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GENERAL EDITOR 

WILBUR LUCIUS CROSS 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN YALE UNIVERSITY 




Robert Browning 

From a portrait by Rudolf Lehmann, now in the 
National Portrait Gallery, London 



^^ 



POEMS 

OF 

ROBERT BROWNING 



SELECTED AND EDITED 

BY 

CHARLES W, HODELL 

t 
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, GOUCHER COLLEGE, BALTIMORE 




w 



NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

191 1 






Copyright, 191 1, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



^> 



T. MOREY & SON 
EtECTROTYPERvS & PRINTERS, GREENFIELD, MASS. 



« 



©CI.A289499 






PREFATORY NOTE 

These selections from Browning include the poems pre- 
scribed by the National Conference on Uniform Entrance 
Requirements in EngHsh, and such other poems as may 
peal to students in the secondary school. The editor 
as also added a few numbers to which the student may 
lifted by the power of a skilled teacher, such as Saul 
A Rabbi Ben Ezra. The poems are arranged in groups, 
proceeding from the easier to the more difficult. The 
notes and comment are interpretative rather than gram- 
matical, philological, or historical, their aim being to 
stimulate the reader rather than to inform him. This 
method is made necessary by the peculiar difficulties 
which confront the beginner in approaching Browning. 
Oral reading will be found indispensable to a right under- 
standing of the poems. A few poems (not among those 
prescribed for entrance to college) have been cut down 
considerably. Two hundred lines, for example, have been 
-n from The Flight of the Duchess in order to bring it 
"I the compass of this volume. The epistolary stanzas 
' Guardian Angel are omitted, as are the closing Unes 
Glove and two of the more difficult stanzas of At the 
laid. The volume will have served its purpose if it 
. in making Browning not a mere name, but a vital 
.mulus, to beginners in the study of poetry. 



m 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 

I. Browning's Life and Works 

II. Browning as a Literary Artist 
Descriptive Bibliography 
Poems 

How they Brought the Good News 

Cavalier Tunes 

Why I am a Liberal 

The Lost Leader 

The Patriot 

Incident of the French Camp 

The Italian in England 

HerveRiel 

Pheidippides 

Home Thoughts from Abroad 

Home Thoughts from the Sea 

Up at a Villa — Down in the City 

Confessions 

A Face 

Evelyn Hope 

Love among the Ruins 

One Word More 

My Star . 

James Lee's Wife — On the Chff 

Summum Bonum 

The Laboratory 

Count Gismond 



PAGE 

vii 
xviii 
xxxi 

3 
6 

9 

9 

II 

12 

14 
19 
25 
31 
32 
32 
37 
3^ 
39 
41 
44 
52 
52 
54 
55 
57 



^^ Contents 

PAGE 

The Glove . 62 

Muckle-Mouth Meg 68 

My Last Duchess 70 

The Flight of the Duchess 72 

The Guardian-Angel 96 

At the Mermaid 97 

The Boy and the Angel 102 

Amphibian 106 

Among the Rocks 109 

Song from " Pippa Passes " no 

Rabbi Ben Ezra . . . . . . .110 

Saul 118 

Prospice , . 137 

Epilogue to ''Asolando" 138 

Notes and Comment 141 



Portrait of Robert Browning Frontispiece 



INTRODUCTION 



BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORKS 

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb 
of London, May 7, 181 2. 

His father, also named Robert, was a notable man. 
Though denied the education he craved, the elder Brown- 
ing became a highly self-educated man, through intimacy 
with a well-selected library of five thousand volumes, 
which had been deliberately gleaned from the book-stalls 
of London and Paris. As a youth he had been sent out to 
the West Indies to supervise his mother's plantation, but 
in his horror of slavery as seen there he abandoned his 
task and his inheritance with it; for his father, who was a 
sternly practical man, would tolerate no such sentiment 
and cast him ofif. The son then entered upon his life of 
clerical service in the Bank of England. In middle life 
he declined promotion to great responsibility at a large 
salary because it involved sacrificing his higher tastes in 
books and art to the demands of business. He lived to 
enjoy a long period of relief from toil and to see most 
of his son's best work. Rossetti speaks of him as ''lov- 
able beyond description." W. J. Stillman writes of him: 
''He had the perpetual juvenility of an ever-blessed 

vii 



viii Introduction 

child. If to live in the world as not of it indicates a 
saintly nature, then Robert Browning the elder was a 
saint, a serene, untroubled soul, and as gentle as a gentle 
woman. '^ 

Browning's mother contributed chiefly to the emotional 
and spiritual life of her child. She was tender-hearted, 
sympathetic, and devoutly religious — ^Hhe true type of a 
Scottish gentlewoman,'' as Carlyle expressed it. The son 
was passionately devoted to her, and shared her interest 
in animals and flowers. In one of his love letters Brow^n- 
ing writes: ^^You cannot conceive my mother's childlike 
faith in goodness." 

"The home in Camberwell," writes Professor Charles 
Herford, "reflected the serene, harmonious, self-contented 
character of his parents. Friends rarely disturbed the 
even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics seem to 
have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as 
the roar of London. Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps con- 
tained few homes so pure and refined." 

The education of Browning was irregular but he was 
given every opportunity to store and train his unusual 
type of mind. It is said that his father hummed him to 
sleep with the odes of Anacreon, and rimed the primary 
elements of education to make them the easier for the 
child to master. There was but a moderate amount of 
formal schooling, but home instruction and private tutor- 
ing amply supplied the lack, and the free range of a large 
library with the thoughtful guidance of such a father was 
the best of schooling. The Dulwich Gallery was in easy 
walking distance, and the galleries and concert rooms of 
London were visited frequently. He entered for a few 
lecture courses at University College, London, but went 
no further in formal college education. In this way he 



Browning's Life and Works ix 

missed the exact and systematic scholarship of such of his 
contemporaries as Tennyson and Arnold, but achieved 
rare affluence of mind, by his omnivorous reading. Joe Jef- 
ferson in his Autobiography says: "If any of the company 
opened a subject, Mr. Browning knew more about it than 
anybody else. Not that he intruded his information; on 
the contrary it was given with such modesty and good 
taste that we were only too glad to be enlightened from 
such a well-spring of learning. '' 

Browning was destined to art from early years. He was 
a prolific writer of rimes in childhood, not remembering 
the time when he had not made them, but he insisted on 
destroying the copies of these juvenile poems which his 
father had cherished so proudly. Other arts than poetry 
had their claims on him. He was a skilled amateur in 
music and was fascinated with sculpture under the in- 
spiration of his friend W. W. Story. When at the age of 
eighteen he decided to devote himself to poetry, he set 
himself to mastering Johnson's Dictionary to enrich his 
treasury of words. To this art of poetry he was devoted 
for sixty years, never turning aside save for an ineffectual 
attempt to gain a diplomatic post. He gave up all thought 
of lucrative employment, and his father gladly enabled 
him to do so. He lived in wise frugality the life of a cul- 
tivated gentleman, without the conscious pose of a bard, 
but with a strong sense of the dignity and duty of his high 
calling. 

His first published volume, Pauline, 1833, was promis- 
ing, and eloquent at times, yet ineffective on the whole. 
He proved his power two years later in Paracelsus, and 
won a few admirers. Encouraged by their praise, he set 
to work more elaborately on Sordello, which was not com- 
pleted and published for five years. These three long 



X Introduction 

poems give the soul-history of three daring idealists, 
thinkers, poets, who had much in common with Browning. 
But all of these poems were too long, too serious, too diffi- 
cult for the first essay of a new poet who wished to win 
an audience. Browning was far more effective, though 
less ambitious, in the shorter poems, the dramatic lyrics 
and romances, thrown off spontaneously and rapidly as an 
almost unconscious by-product while he was engaged on 
more pretentious works. When a friend once told him 
that his admirers wished for more of the lyrics, he answered 
in a tone of contempt: ^'Lyrics, if you want lyrics, I can 
give you bucketsful." All of these earUer short poems are 
dramatic, and not personal, and show a remarkable power 
in the young poetiof entering imaginatively into the 
thought or passion of persons quite remote from his own 
nature. They were ultimately pubhshed with the dramas 
in a series of cheap, paper back volumes, called Bells and 
Pomegranates, designed by the poet and his publisher to 
win a larger public. Eight numbers were issued between 
1 84 1 and 1846, and a somewhat larger audience was 
reached; yet at the end of the series. Browning's name was 
scarcely known, w^hile Tennyson and Miss Barrett had 
won fame and a general pubUc by their volumes of 1842 
and 1844 respectively. 

Browning's more am-bitious and formal endeavor at this 
time w^as devoted to the drama. Macready, the great 
tragic actor of the day, had been won by Paracelsus, and 
welcomed the acquaintance of the promising young poet. 
In Macready's home Browning met a new circle of actors 
and literary men, and felt a new stimulus to work. Fan- 
nie Kemble describes him at this time as ^^slim, dark, and 
very handsome — just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to 
lemon-colored kid gloves and such things, quite the glass 



Browning's Life and Works xi 

of fashion and the mould of form. But full of ambition, 
eager for success, eager for fame, and what is more, deter- 
mined to conquer fame and win success. '^ On the evening 
of May 26, 1836, after the triumphant performance of 
Talfourd's Ion, Browning supped at Macready's rooms 
with Wordsworth and Landor. ''Write a play. Brown- 
ing," said Macready, as his guests were leaving, ''and keep 
me from going to America." "Shall it be historical or 
English? What do you say to a drama on Strafford?" 
replied Browning, who had been assisting Forster with a 
Ufe of Strafford. Nearly a year later the play was pro- 
duced by Macready with but meager stage furnishing. 
After a half-success for five nights it was withdrawn. 
Browning declared to his friends that he would never 
again write a play. Yet he repeatedly returned to the 
task, sometimes writing carefully according to the theat- 
rical requirements of his day and doing his best to reach 
the living stage, in such plays as The Return of the Druses^ 
A Blot in the ^Scutcheon, and Colombe^s Birthday, But 
when failure attended these efforts, he took the larger 
freedom of the dramatic poem in his Pippa Passes, King 
Victor and King Charles, A SouVs Tragedy, and Luria, 
Browning's favorite among his dramas. While Browning 
failed to win success as a practical dramatist, this series of 
poetical dramas and dramatic poems is one of his richest 
contributions to English poetry. 

Browning spent these years uneventfully in his suburban 
home. A small circle of Hterary acquaintance gradually 
opened to him, including John Forster and his friend 
Charles Dickens, then newly known to fame as author of 
Pickwick and Oliver Twist, Milnes, Landor, Wordsworth 
in rare visits to London, and Leigh Hunt, the patron of 
all yoimg poets. At the house of Hunt, he met Carlyle, 



xii Introduction 

who formed a strong liking for Browning, who became a 
frequent visitor at the Carlyle home. Yet he had few real 
friends. 

In 1834 he had taken a trip of several months to Rus- 
sia in a semi-official capacity, but his first journey to Italy 
in 1838 was of far more importance. It was made by slow 
going merchant vessel to suit his slender purse. He en- 
joyed ^Hhe solitariness of the one passenger among all 
those rough new creatures. I like it much and soon get 
deep into their friendship." The discovery of the derelict 
of an Algerine pirate, bottom up, and the gruesome greed 
of the British tars in rifling her, furnished a horribly gro- 
tesque incident. Yet in the midst of these surroundings 
he wrote his Home Thoughts from the Sea and How They 
Brought the Good iV^2£^5. l/Br owning spent several weeks 
among the cities of northern Italy, and for the first time 
felt the charm which endeared to him that ^^ woman coun- 
try, wooed not wed, loved all the more by earth's male 
lands.'' Italy influenced Browning profoundly and she 
became a second mother-land to him. He was intimately 
acquainted with her art and with the glory of her great 
past particularly during the Renaissance. He used his 
knowledge of Italy immediately on his return in the writ- 
ing of Sordello and Pippa Passes. He made a second Ital- 
ian tour six years later. 

Browning had now passed his thirtieth birthday and 
was entirely heart free, his strong affections spending 
themselves on his narrow family circle. To use his own 
figure in A Tale^ the one string ^' which made love sound 
soft" was lacking in his harp. Then EHzabeth Barrett 
entered his life, bringing a new joy for himself and awak- 
ening a whole range of new powers. Their love story is 
one of the best known and fairest in all literary history. 



Browning's Life and Works xiii 

and it is fully recorded in the published Love Letters and 
the Sonnets from the Portuguese. 

Elizabeth Barrett (b. 1806) was England's chief poetess 
in the early Victorian era, rivaUng Tennyson in contem- 
porary favor. Certain injuries which she had sustained 
in girlhood made her an invalid for life. Years were spent 
in the utter seclusion of the sick-room. Yet an unconquer- 
able spirit mastered the ruined body. We have but to 
read her published correspondence for these years to see 
how busily she kept employed. In spite of her suffering, 
she became highly self-educated. Her spirit found Uberty 
in the volumes of verse she printed from time to time, 
yet even after the generous fame which greeted her 
volume in 1844, she was entirely unknown to the outside 
world. 

Suddenly a pleasing reference to Browning's poetry in 
her Lady Geraldine^s Courtship spanned the distance be- 
tween their two lives. Words of appreciation for his po- 
etry came but rarely to Browning then, and this flattering 
word was spoken by a poetess whose work he already ad- 
mired cordially. On the advice of John Kenyon, Browning 
wrote a letter of acknowledgment. This opened a corre- 
spondence between them in almost daily exchange of let-' 
ters. After three months Browning was permitted to call. 
He immediately offered his hand. Yet even after her 
heart was won. Miss Barrett would not suffer the strong 
attractive man to couple his Hfe with her frail, ruined 
body; this, as she felt, would be cruel affection. The new 
joy that came with love, however, proved more potent 
than the medical treatment of years, and her health im- 
proved steadily. At last they were married in Septem- 
ber, 1846. 

The newly wedded poets passed by easy stages to Italy, 



xiv Introduction 

which was to be their home for the fifteen years of their 
union, — years which brought to both of them their best 
experiences, and produced a higher and more perfect art 
in both artists. As Brow^ning wrote in By the Fireside: 

I am named and known by that moment's feat, 

There took my station and degree; 
So grew my own small life complete, 

As nature attained her best in me. 

After brief sojourns at Pisa, Lucca, and elsewhere, they 
found a permanent home at Florence in the spacious sec- 
ond floor apartments of Casa Guidi near the Pitti Palace, 
which was soon stored with rare old furniture, mirrors, 
paintings, tapestries, and countless gleanings from the old 
marts of the city. Here with music and books and their 
own tasks as poets, and later still with the care of their 
son Robert Barrett, born in 1849, their home life seems 
to have been full of all that is best; so Browning was as 
much favored in this respect as he had been in old Camber- 
well days. They lived here with a scrupulous business- 
like economy which rather amused Mrs. Browning, who 
wrote to a friend: ^^ Being descended from the blood of all 
the Puritans^ .and educated by the strictest of dissenters, 
he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing 
five shillings five days.'' It was not till 1856 that the be- 
quest of John Kenyon to his pair of poet-friends raised 
them to comparative affluence. At Casa Guidi they wel- 
comed many interesting people from the Anglo-American 
colony, W. W. Story the sculptor being chief among these. 
Here came American and English travelers. Bayard Tay- 
lor, Emerson, Thackeray, Hawthorne and Mrs. Jameson 
among them. Hawthorne's description in his Italian 
Notes, June 9, 1858, has become one of the classic frag- 



Browning's Life and Works xv 

ments in the biographies of Browning. Frances Power 
Cobb in her Autobiography tells of this period at some 
length: ^' Among our most frequent visitors was Mr. 
Browning. Always full of spirits, full of interest in every- 
thing from politics to hedge flowers, cordial and utterly 
unaffected, he was at all times a charming member of so- 
ciety; but I confess that in those days I had no adequate 
sense of his greatness as a poet. His conversation was so 
playful and light that it never occurred to me that I was 
wasting precious time chatting frivolously with him when 
I might have been gaining high thoughts and instruction. 
There was always a ripple of laughter around the sofa 
where he used to seat himself, generally beside some lady 
of the company, toward whom in his eagerness, he would 
push nearer and nearer, till she frequently rose to avoid 
falling off at the end. Never certainly did the proverb 
about the irritabile genus of poets prove less true. All 
through his life, even when the world had found him out, 
he remained the same absolutely unaffected, unassuming, 
genial English gentleman." 

Outside of the home lay Florence, with her inexhausti- 
ble interest for Browning. The life of the street was pic- 
turesque, the shadows of the historic past fascinated his 
imagination, and he knew every nook and corner of the 
old palaces, monasteries, and churches with their faded 
splendors of the art of former days. Mrs. Browning went 
occasionally to the Pitti Gallery, or for a drive. Some- 
times they fled from the heat of summer to the mountains 
or seashore. Twice they returned to England and Paris 
for a protracted visit. Yet their life was entirely unevent- 
ful and happy. 

The years were too happy to be prolific of poetry. 
Browning produced only his Christmas-Eve and Easter- 



xvi Introduction 

Day (1850); and Men and Women (1855), the latter vol- 
ume containing fifty short poems, including some of the 
finest things ever achieved by Browning. Yet he wrote 
only intermittently, as subjects offered themselves, not 
caring to occupy himself continuously on larger subjects. 
Mrs. Browning frequently used verse to voice her passion- 
ate interest in the struggle for ItaUan liberation. She also 
wrote Aurora Leigh (1856), her poetic novel, which stands 
as her most representative work, the outpouring of her 
rare womanhood. This all came to an end with her death 
in June, 1861. 

Browning soon returned to England with his son, to 
whose education he devoted much of his attention. For the 
next twenty-five years he was one of the best known liter- 
ary lions of London. Outwardly he lived the active life 
of social engagement with the best society London could 
afford, — dinners, garden parties, the galleries, exhibitions, 
and theaters. Seen and known everywhere, he proved 
himself a master conversationalist in all companies. Phil- 
lips Brooks records the following impression of him: ^^He 
is one of the nicest people in London to pass an evening 
with. He is a clear-headed and particularly clear-eyed 
man of the world, devoted to society, one of the greatest 
diners-out in London, cordial and hearty as a dear, old 
uncle, shakes your hand as if he were really glad to see 
you. He seemed to me very like some of the best of 
Thackeray's London men. But nobody ever talked more 
nobly, truly, and cheerily than he. I went home and 
slept after hearing him, as one does after a fresh starlight 
walk with a good cool breeze on his face." There was 
kindliness, courtesy, ease, the perfect flower of conven- 
tional good breeding in all he did. It was a busy, un- 
eventful life, made noteworthy only by the personal 



Browning's Life and Works xvii 

quality of Browning, which impressed everyone with 
whom he came in contact. 

His first poetic utterance after the death of Mrs. Brown- 
ing was in Dramatis Personm^ a volume of short poems, in- 
cluding his Prospice and Rabbi Ben Ezra, poems burdened 
with a weight of spiritual meaning which had come to 
him in his sorrow. Four years were then devoted to his 
longest, and in many respects, his most remarkable poem, 
The Ring and the Book (1868-69), based on the chance- 
found record of an Italian murder stor>\ Then for a 
dozen years he passed uninterruptedly from one poetic 
task to another, issuing almost a volume a year. Most 
noteworthy among these is Balaustion^s Adventure, an 
adaptation of the Alcestis of Euripides, and his Dramatic 
Idyls, including some of his finest narrative and descrip- 
tive poetry. His last volume of poems, Asolando, still 
fresh and spontaneous, was written during his closing 
years, and was published on the very last day of his life. 

Fame came late to Browning, but came in abundant 
measure. Men and Women, 1855, turned the tide of opin- 
ion in his favor, and by the publication of Dramatis Per- 
sonce, 1864, he won recognition as a master poet. His 
fame and audience grew steadily until they reached an 
unusual culmination in the organization of the Browning 
Society in London, 1881, when a group of critics, students, 
and lovers of literature banded themselves together for 
the study of the works of a living poet. Browning ac- 
cepted recognition, so slow in arriving, with courteous in- 
difference, and would seldom talk of his poetry to ac- 
quaintances. Fame had come too late to furnish him an 
ambition; friendly criticism and appreciation had come too 
late to affect his art. 

During his later years he made frequent visits to Italy, 



xviii Introduction 

but not to Florence, spending most of his time in Venice 
and its neighborhood. We have an excellent picture of 
Browning at this time in two articles in the Century Mag- 
azine for 1901, by his American friend, Mrs. Bronson. 
With the purchase of the Rezzonico Palace in Venice in 
1888 Browning again had a permanent Italian home. He 
was even planning the purchase of the old tower at Asolo, 
which had long before caught his fancy. Young in spirit, 
vigorous and happy he continued to the very end. In the 
very last month of his life he was actively planning future 
work and future pleasure with the same spontaneity and 
cheer. His age seemed scarcely age at all. He had real- 
ized the prophecy of his own Rabhi Ben Ezra. He died 
in Venice, December 12, 1889, and was buried in Poets' 
Corner, Westminster Abbey. Three years later Tenny- 
son was laid by his side. 



II 

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 

As the Victorian Age recedes from our twentieth cen- 
tury and the verdict of time is passed on its leading writers. 
Browning has taken rank beside Tennyson as one of its 
chief poetic voices. Yet few important writers have suf- 
fered such extremes of abuse and adulation at the hands 
of critics. This has arisen from his uncompromising in- 
dividuality in all that concerns his art. He did not care 
to follow the accepted conventions of art. He had no 
reverence for the mere patterns of great art. Poetry to 
him was a progressive revelation of the human spirit, re- 
quiring ever new forms in which to embody itself. He 



Browning as a Literary Artist xix 

shocked the taste of many by his frank handHng of the 
grotesque, the horrible, the malevolent, the ridiculous, as 
he openly extended the field of poetry into many a hitherto 
forbidden realm. He ignored the accepted dogma of har- 
monious verse, and with almost reckless independence 
made a style and a prosody of his own. As his ear for 
the music of language was at times faulty, he produced 
some grievous discords. Tennyson could not like his 
poetry, though he liked the man greatly, and there is im- 
plied criticism in his remark to AUingham: ^^If the pro- 
nunciation of the English language were forgotten, Brown- 
ing would be held the greatest of modern poets, having 
treated the greatest variety of subjects in a powerful 
manner.^' And Thackeray in rejecting Browning's poetry 
declared: ''Well, you see I want poetry to be musical, to 
run sweetly." Yet by a power peculiarly his own. Brown- 
ing has won the admiration of a wide audience of the most 
intelligent English readers. 

Browning is essentially not a singer, an improviser of 
words sweetly tuned, but a creator, reproducing and inter- 
preting life in word-pictures of men and women, who are 
types of some thought or passion of the human heart, or 
who in their story reveal some of the deeper truth of hu- 
manity. He is never concerned with mere beauty as 
such; the grotesque may be quite as important to him. 
Outward nature with all her loveliness, which had steeped 
the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, and which 
was so important to Tennyson, is purely incidental, in his 
feeling, to the study of human nature. Furthermore, he 
would present man, not collectively, or as a mere unit in 
the large movements of history or of present society, but as 
an individual, in the inner sense of his own self-importance; 
for the most trivial of men lives a life that is large to 



XX Introduction 

himself as compared with the big things of the outer 
world. And Browning is interested not merely in what a 
man does, in what ^^ takes the eye, and has the price," but 
he traces with close concern unvoiced passions, unrealized 
ideals, unnoted struggles, hidden sins and sorrows, and 
the deep heart's joy — all that vital personality which lies 
beneath every man's outward and obvious career. 

Hence Browning's works must be regarded as a series 
of representations in verse of human personaHties, of men 
or women, whose thought or feeHng reveals some truth of 
humanity. Browning has created these personalities by 
scores and hundreds. A chance anecdote, a picture, a 
fragment of history or literature would start this creative 
activity awork, — the Cavalier singing for King Charles, 
the French soldier-boy at Ratisbon, Herve Riel saving 
the French fleet, Pheidippides in his world renowned 
Marathon race. Or it may be some purely imaginary tale 
or passion, such as the Duchess escaping from the con- 
ventional life of her ^^ middle-age-manners-adapter" to 
find freedom with the gypsy crone. These flashes of hu- 
manity were Browning's poems. 

To aid him in revealing the inner life of men through 
the art of poetry. Browning adopted the dramatic mono- 
logue as his usual type of poem. The monologue, or char- 
acteristic speech of some single clearly imagined person, 
has existed in folk tales and folk ballads since the primi- 
tive ages of poetry. Early epics are studded with them. 
Then the Shakespearean drama is continually showing 
the manifold effectiveness of single speeches to tell a 
story, to reveal a situation or character, to make clear 
some bond of human relationship, or to embody a domi- 
nant passion or a wave of feeling. The Shakespearean 
soliloquies are continually used in these ways, and so are 



Browning as a Literary Artist xxi 

long character speeches Kke Mercutio's declamation on 
Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet. The monologue had 
long been in use before Browning made it peculiarly his 
own by intensifying its revelation of the inner life. The 
monologue is in fact a miniature drama, stripped of stage 
accessories and of the elaborate machinery of dramatic 
plotting. 

The monologue, like the regular drama, is the more 
successful in its presentation of men from the fact that 
it represents them by an actual living voice. No imper- 
sonal narrative can match the effectiveness of such dra- 
matic voicing of the story. In fact good story-tellers re- 
sort to the device repeatedly, whether it be Uncle Remus 
or Mr. Dooley. The narrative of even Plutarch cannot 
rival the effect of the play of Jtdius Ccesar in dramatic 
presentation, nor can the subtlest exposition by critics 
equal the effect of the play of Hamlet. Living speech has 
countless innuendoes of meaning; intonation and inflec- 
tion by the voice produce the finest shadings of thought 
or emotion. Browning's art therefore is to create such 
an imaginary human voice, and to call in all of the sub- 
tleties of the voice to his aid. This he does by clairvoy- 
ant power. The printed words are but symbols of the liv- 
ing voice, as the notes are but symbols of the movement 
of melody in music. The poem is not really alive until 
either actually or by power of imagination the reader hears 
this voice with all its subtle effects. Accidental betray- 
als of meaning will start from the text, giving the reader 
a sense of creative power, so that he seems to participate 
in the making of the poem as the performer does in the 
making of music. The failure to respond through the 
voice thus vitally to the dead letter-text of the printed 
page has made Browning unintelligible to many a reader. 



xxii Introduction 

We should bring to Browning that power we employ 
every day w^hen we judge the character and feeling of 
those around us by what they say and their manner of 
saying it, when we let not a hesitation of voice, nor the 
stumble in a word escape our detective fancies. 

Still further. Browning continually couples the term 
^' dramatic^' with his poetry to emphasize the aloofness 
of the speaker, with all his thoughts and sentiments, from 
the poet himself. Browning was concerned, not with re- 
vealing his own private life, but with what he had seen 
and found interesting in the world. He excluded his own 
personal experiences from his verse. The reader must 
therefore enter into the poem by exercise of his responsive 
dramatic imagination, putting himself into the lives and 
hearts of these imaginary men and women as Browning 
did before him, thinking their thoughts and feeling their 
passions. Just as in reading Shakespeare, we must sub- 
mit for the time to this other person, even though he is 
loathsome to us. But this art must be practiced in reahz- 
ing even a child's fairy story effectively. 

A number of typical questions may serve to guide the 
requickening imagination to this dramatic personage and 
the poem as a whole. Who is the speaker? To whom is 
he speaking? Do his words, as so often in real Hfe, imply 
or portray some third person not present and yet perhaps 
far more interesting than the speaker himseK? What has 
occasioned the speech? Under what circumstances is it 
made? What story leads up to or away from this moment 
of speech? What is Browning's purpose in presenting 
such a speaker and such a speech? How has he adapted 
the form and movement of the poem to the speaker and 
the occasion? Not even tentative answers may be offered 
as we enter upon a poem for the first time, and we lose 



Browning as a Literary Artist xxiii 

much of what is said in our first reading, as we would in 
Ustening to a broken fragment of hving speech on some new 
topic. But by repeated readings we come to understand 
this imaginary man or woman, and at last to comprehend 
the full meaning of the poet's utterance. 

Our initial purpose must be to realize as far as possible 
the speaker. He may be the very heart of the poem, as 
in The Italian in England, or he may be an insignificant 
mouthpiece, as in the Incident of the French Camp. The 
dramatic intensity of the monologue is governed by the 
importance of his character. Where he sinks into a mere 
impersonal narrator, the poem loses the more significant 
features of monologue art. iln My Last Duchess we reahze 
with the very opening words that a great nobleman is 
speaking concerning his deceased wife. We read on from 
line to line, and the Duke's character gradually becomes 
m.anifest, — his cool, refined connoisseurship even over the 
portrait of his wife, his brutal, cynical resentment of her 
glad heartedness, the haughtiness which chooses ^^ never to 
stoop," the relentless pride in the ^^ nine-hundred-years-old 
name," which occasioned ^'commands," so that ^'all 
smiles stopped together," his studied unconcern about the 
dowry of his next Duchess, his flawless courtesy, alto- 
gether making him a genteel and highly cultured Blue- 
beard.' In The Flight of the Duchess, the narrator is far less 
important in the poem as a whole; and in How they Brought 
the Good News, the speaker who rode the gallant Roland is 
purely secondar^^ to his heroic horse. No definite rule 
governs the degree of the speaker's importance, but he is 
usually a key to the understanding of the poem. 

There is also in most monologues a person spoken to; 
Bro\\ming rarely uses soliloquy. This person is usually 
without special significance and does not effect the course 



xxiv Introduction 

of the speech. He is merely an open ear. Such dummy- 
listeners are less frequently found in the regular drama, 
which represents the active give-and-take between two or 
more minds. Browning, however, was wiUing to leave 
the listener colorless that he might reveal more deeply the 
heart of the speaker. Such listeners are found in the 
nameless ^^ friend '^ of The Flight of the Duchess, in the aged 
mixer of poisons in The Laboratory, in the Athenian Coun- 
cil addressed by Pheidippides, in the friends of the Mer- 
maid Tavern in At the Mermaid. But this listener may 
fade away until he is unidentifiable, as in the Incident of 
the French Camp, Saul, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. 

Not infrequently some third absent person becomes 
clear in the speech, and may in fact be the very occasion 
of the speech, the author revealing a character indirectly 
by what another says about the one he really desires to 
reveal. This is practiced continually in the drama, as 
when the talk about Romeo introduces the audience to 
him before he appears on the stage. And in life we com- 
monly draw our knowledge of absent and unknown people 
from the speech of another about them. The Duchess is 
undoubtedly the primary personage in The Flight, but we 
know her only through the speech of the old huntsman. 
Count Gismond and his rival Gautier appear only in the 
words of the wife who is speaking, and the lady in The 
Glove is seen through the words of Ronsard who tells her 
story. And at times, as in life everywhere, the listener 
draws by his own inference an entirely different impression 
of this absent character from the one held by the speaker. 
The reader utterly dissents from the Duke's estimate of 
his last Duchess, and feels that he has caught the truth of 
her character in spite of her husband's scorn. 

Though persons are the prime interest in Browning's 



Browning as a Literary Artist xxv 

monologues, there is usually a story, told very scantly save 
in a few narrative poems. Browning cares only for such 
incidents as reveal or affect the character and omits most 
of them, leaving the reader the fascinating task of recon- 
structing the story from scattered hints. The Duke does 
not tell the dark tragedy of his girl wife, but he excites 
the reader's imagination to fill out the whole course of it. 
Browning's readers often asked him what the " commands " 
were with which the story ends, but most readers prefer 
to fill in this last page for themselves. The Patriot does 
not give any connected account of his political career 
during his year of public service, — the gathering conspir- 
acy against him, the open attack, the trial, and the con- 
demnation all are hidden. In some of the monologues 
however there is scarcely a semblance of a story possible, 
as in Up at a Villa. Even when Browning tells a story 
at greater length, as in Herve Riel and The Flight of the 
Duchess, he is far more concerned with the thought and 
feeling of the characters than with what they did, and 
seldom makes a good narrative from the standpoint of in- 
cident alone. The Flight is meager in incident as com- 
pared with a poem by Scott of the same length. 

It is also necessary, though less importantly so, that 
the reader reconstruct the situation, the circumstances 
surrounding the speaker. In the stage drama this is 
done by stage accessories through the eye; but as we read 
the text of the drama in a book, our mind's eye must 
create all this pictorial background. This is necessary 
likewise, though not so importantly so, in the monologue, 
and such reconstruction must be made from apparently 
stray hints scattered through the poem. ^ In My Last 
Duchess we can imagine a spacious sumptuously adorned 
gallery in the palace, with the Duke and his guest seated 



xxvi Introduction 

before the curtained portrait. After the picture has been 
explained, the curtain is drawn, and speaker and hstener 
pass together down the great stairway to join the company 
below, pausing for but a moment at the window on the 
landing to glance down at the splendid bronze fountain 
of Claus of Innsbruck.* The situation may be vitally im- 
portant to the understanding of the poem, as in The Pa- 
triot ^ The Laboratory^ and Love Among the Ruins, or again 
it may be quite insignificant as in Rabbi Ben Ezra or The 
Italian in England, In the latter case, some situation in 
the story itself may assume importance in the poem, and 
may be vividly reaHzed, as in the Italian's interview with 
the peasant woman who saved him, or the scene of the 
flinging of the glove, or Count Gismond's rescue of the 
Lady from the false accusation of Gautier. 

When we have reconstructed character, story, and sit- 
uation so that the monologue is thoroughly alive, we may 
ask what was the artistic purpose of the poet in present- 
ing his picture. No stereotyped answer will serve here, 
for Browning's art motive varies widely. In earlier short 
poems, he seems to take pleasure in exhibiting frankly 
certain monstrosities of soul — the virulent monk in the 
Spanish Cloister, or the passionate lady in The Laboratory. 
Then there are the problem-monologues such as The 
Glove, w^here the poet seeks to fathom more truly some 
old tale. Or there is a desire to realize some character, 
which will epitomize a page of human history, as in Cava- 
lier Tunes or Pheidippides, or some great truth of human 
nature, as that ^'love is best" in Love Among the Ruins, 
or the supreme values of life in Rabbi Ben Ezra. Or the 
poet may wish to tell a story, as in The Flight of the Duch- 
ess. Or he may wish to set forth some principle of art 
and of the artist's life, as in ^/ the Mermaid, or some fun- 



Browning as a Literary Artist xxvii 

damental truth in Browning's view of the scheme of 
things, as in Saul. At times the motive may have nothing 
higher than a sense of grotesquerie or queerness, as in 
Confessions, Browning's purpose varies widely and in- 
cessantly. He is able to turn the monologue form to 
effectiveness in a hundred moods and purposes. Here 
again the student must form the habit of judging each 
new poem by its own effect, and must let it have its true 
effect naturally. 

The style of the monologue is almost equally variable, 
for it is supposed to be living speech, controlled by the 
personaHty of the speaker. The formal, sustained style 
of undramatic literature would be bad style in that case. 
As in all dramatic speech, the true criterion of excellence 
is dramatic fidelity to the speaker, not stereotyped excel- 
lence of conventional good style. The old servitor tells 
the story of The Flight of the Duchess in rough, homely 
sincerity; Evelyn Hope's lover speaks in quiet, earnest con- 
trol with the words of a cultured gentleman, while the 
shepherd poet-prophet David pours forth a style of glo- 
rious poetic beauty. Then as the mood of the speaker 
varies, the style will range widely; there is not sustained 
uniformity, but the bewildering variety of intense pas- 
sionate speech. Still further, much is left imperfectly 
stated. There are broken sentences and interrupted 
thought. More is meant than is said; irony, innuendo, hid- 
den meanings, tinge the style. Few poets have been more 
successful in the use of dramatic irony. The passionate 
flash of some fragment of a sentence may mean more than 
a whole formal stanza diluted to regularity. The reader 
may find in the very irregularities of manner, in the vio- 
lences of style, a great deal of the secret of the poem. 

Yet as in Shakespeare or in any other dramatic writer, 



xxviii Introduction 

these various styles are dominated by the characteristic 
manner of the poet himself, the natural expression of his 
own personality. Browning has a vivid, living, untram- 
meled style, leaping rapidly from idea to idea, giving but 
slight heed to the graces of harmonious speech, and ellip- 
tical to an almost confusing extent. This style has proved 
difficult to many a reader, and the charge of obscurity 
has become proverbial against Browning. 

That Browning is often obscure cannot be denied, and 
he has had to pay the penalty of alienating many a reader. 
Yet much of the best of Browning is readily intelligible 
to a person who reads with imagination. A brief state- 
ment of the more characteristic diflScul ties may assist ma- 
terially the beginner. Chief of these is Browning's habit, 
due probably to the rapidity of his own mind, of eliding 
many of the smaller words of relationship which make 
language run smoothly, the relative pronoun, the article, 
the auxiliary verb as far as possible, and the conjunction. 
An alert, energetic reader readily suppHes these ehsions. 
The style thus gains in vividness and strength what it 
loses in ease and fluency and grace. Another difficulty 
lies in Browning's proneness to parentheses and digres- 
sions of thought, which break the flow of interpretation. 
Then there is a difficulty arising from casual references to 
little known facts of history and biography, or to unusual 
lore. Few poets do so much of this and it came naturally 
from the affluence of Browning's mind; he little reaUzed 
that much that was known to him was unknown to his 
reader. Yet not infrequently these references may be 
left entirely unexplained without marring the dramatic 
effectiveness of the monologue. It adds little to the ap- 
preciation of the Incident of the French Camp to know the 
history of the storming of Ratisbon, and a knowledge of 



Browning as a Literary Artist xxix 

the geography of the country between Ghent and Aix adds 
nothing to the appreciation of Good News. Finally, there 
is the difficulty arising from the lack of a stereotyped 
form and style, which renders each new poem a challenge 
to our understanding, and many minds have slight adapt- 
iveness for this sort of work. These difficulties, genuine 
though they be, are not formidable to an active intelli- 
gence, and Browning is said to have declared that he had 
not written his poetry as a substitute for a lazy man's 
cigar. The difficulties vanish when honestly grappled. 

There is abundant rew^ard in the vigor and power, in 
the sense of personal mastery, in the insight, in the lofti- 
ness of spirit which characterize Browning, and few poets 
have taken such firm hold on their lovers and have en- 
tered so deeply into the making of character. So that to 
enter the work of Browning is to add a permanent per- 
sonal resource to one's inner life. 



DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The best account of the Hfe of Browning is given by 
Edward Dowden in the Temple Biographies series (Put- 
nam), which should be supplemented by the shorter 
biography of C. H. Herford (Dodd, Mead & Co.). The 
fullest biography and an ultimate source of knowledge in 
such matters is by Mrs. Southerland Orr (Houghton Mif- 
flin Company). Chesterton in an English Men of Letters 
volume has made one of the most interesting and suggest- 
ive studies of the poet. The Browning Encyclopcedia by 
Berdoe (Macmillan) and the Browning Guide Book by 
George Willis Cooke (Houghton MiflBin Company) give ex- 
planations and annotations on all the poems. The Let- 
ters of Mrs. Browning (Macmillan) and the Letters of 
Robert and Elizabeth Browning (Harpers) are very impor- 
tant documents for the understanding of the poets, and 
should be read generously. 

Browning's Complete Works were pubHshed by Smith, 
Elder & Co. in sixteen volumes, and are repubhshed in 
many forms, most convenient among which are the single 
volume editions published by Macmillan, Houghton Mif- 
flin Company, and the Oxford Press. Browning himself 
made a selection from his poems for the press which has 
been issued frequently. ** Everyman's Library " offers two 
serviceable volumes of selections. The plays have been 
edited and published separately several times, Rolfe's edi- 
tion (Houghton MifHin Company) being mo^t readily ob- 
tainable. 

xxxi 



xxxii Descriptive Bibliography 

The list of Browning^s published volumes is as follows: — 



1833. 


Pauline. 


1835. 


Paracelsus. 


1837. 


Strafford. 


1840. 


S or dell 0. 


1841-46. 


Bells and Pomegranates, including plays, dramatic lyrics, 




and dramatic romances. 


1850. 


Christmas-Eve and Easter- Day. 


1855- 


Men and Women. 


1868-69. 


The Ring and the Book. 


- I87I. 


Balaustion's Adventure. 


I87I. 


Prince Hohenstiel-Schwajigau. 


1872. 


Fifine at the Fair. 


1873- 


Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. 


1875. 


Aristophanes' Apology. 


1875. 


The Inn Album. 


1876. 


Pacchiarotto and Other Poems. 


1877. 


The Agamemnon of JEschylus. 


1878. 


La Saisiaz. 


1878. 


The Two Poets of Croisic. 


1879-80. 


Dramatic Idylls. 


1883. 


Jocoseria. 


1884. 


Ferishtah's Fancies. 


1887. 


Parleyings with Certain People. 


1889. 


Asolando. 



POEMS OF 
ROBERT BROWNING 



POEMS OF ROBERT BROWNING 

'HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM 
GHENT TO AIX'' 

[16-1 



I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; 

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three; 

'^Good speed!'' cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew; 

^' Speed!'' echoed the wall to us galloping through; 

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, 5 

And into the midnight we galloped abreast. 

II 

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace 

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place; 

I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, 

Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, 10 

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit. 

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. 

Ill 

'T was moonset at starting ; but while we drew near 

Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear; 

At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see; 15 

At Duff eld, 't was morning as plain as could be; 

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chinie, 

So, Joris broke silence with, ^^Yet there is time!" 

3 



4 ''The Good News from Ghent to Aix" 

IV 

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun, 

And against him the cattle stood black every one, 20 

To stare thro' the mist at us galloping past, 

And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last, 

With resolute shoulders, each butting away 

The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray: 

V 

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back 25 
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track; 
And one eye's black intelligence, — ever that glance 
O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance! 
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon 
His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. 30 

VI 

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, "Stay spur! 
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault 's not in her. 
We '11 remember at Aix" — for one heard the quick wheeze 
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees. 
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 35 

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. 

VII 

So, we were left galloping, Joris and I, 
Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; 
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 
'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like 
chaff; 40 

Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white. 
And *^ Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is in sight!" 



C( 



The Good News from Ghent to Aix" 5 



vin 

''How they '11 greet us!" — and all in a moment his roan 
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone; 
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight 45 
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate, 
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim, 
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim. 

IX 

Then I cast loose my bufifcoat, each holster let fall, 
Shook ofif both my jack-boots, let go belt and all, 50 

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear, 
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer; 
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or 

good. 
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood. 

X 

And all I remember is — friends flocking round 55 

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground; 
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine. 
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine. 
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent) 
Was no more than his due who brought good news from 
Ghent. 60 



Cavalier Tunes 



CAVALIER TUNES 



MARCHING ALONG 



Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, 

Bidding the crop-headed ParUament swing: 

And, pressing a troop unable to stoop 

And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, 

Marched them along, fifty-score strong, 5 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 

II 

God for King Charles ! Pym and such carles 

To the Devil that prompts 'em their treasonous paries! 

Cavaliers, up! Lips from the cup. 

Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup 10 

Till you 're — 

(Chorus) Marching along, fifty-score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 

Ill 
Hampden to hell, and his obsequies' knell 
Serve Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well! 
England, good cheer! Rupert is near! 15 

Kentish and loyalists, keep we not here 

{Chorus) Marching along, fifty-score strong. 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song? 



Cavalier Tunes 7 

IV 

Then, God for King Charles! Pym and his snarls 

To the Devil that pricks on such pestilent carles! 20 

Hold by the right, you double your might; 

So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight, 

{Chorus) March we along, fifty-score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song! 

II 

GIVE A ROUSE 



King Charles, and who '11 do him right now? 
King Charles, and who 's ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here 's, in hell's despite now, 
King Charles! 

II 
Who gave me the goods that went since? 5 

Who raised me the house that sank once? 
Who helped me to gold I spent since? 
Who found me in wine you drank once? 

{Chorus) King Charles, and who HI do him right now? 
King Charles, and who ^s ripe for fight now? 10 
Give a rouse: here '5, in helVs despite now. 
King Charles! 

Ill 

To whom used my boy George quaff else, 

By the old fool's side that begot him? 

For whom did he cheer and laugh else, 15 

While Noll's damned troopers shot him? 






8 Cavalier Tunes 

{Chorus) King Charles, and who ^11 do him right now? 
King Charles, and who ^s ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here ^s, in helVs despite now, 
King Charles! 20 



III 

BOOT AND SADDLE 



Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! 
Rescue my castle before the hot day 
Brightens to blue from its silvery gray, 

{Chorus) Boot, saddle, to horse, and awayt 

II 

Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you 'd say; 5 

Many 's the friend there, will listen and pray 
*' God's luck to gallants that strike up the lay — 

{Chorus) ^^Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! " 

III 

Forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay. 

Flouts Castle Brancepeth the Roundheads' array: 10 

Who laughs, ^^Good fellows ere this, by my fay, 

{Chorus) ^'Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

IV 

Who? My wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay, 
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, '^Nay! 
I Ve better counsellors; what counsel they? '' 15 

{Chorus) ^^Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!'' 



The Lost Leader 



WHY I AM A LIBERAL 

''Why?'' Because all I haply can and do, 
All that I am now, all I hope to be, — 
Whence comes it save from fortune setting free 

Body and soul the purpose to pursue, 

God traced for both? If fetters, not a few, 5 

Of prejudice, convention, fall from me. 
These shall I bid men — each in his degree 

Also God-guided — bear, and gayly too? 

But little do or can the best of us: 
That Uttle is achieved thro' Liberty. 10 

Who then dares hold, emancipated thus, 
His fellow shall continue bound? not I, 

Who live, love, labor freely, nor discuss 
A brother's right to freedom. That is ''Why." 



THE LOST LEADER 



Just for a handful of silver he left us. 

Just for a riband to stick in his coat — 
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 

Lost all the others she lets us devote; 
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, 5 

So much was theirs who so little allowed: 
How all our copper had gone for his service! 

Rags — were they purple, his heart had been proud! | 

We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him. 

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 10 



lo The Lost Leader 

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, 

Made him our pattern to live and to die ! 
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us. 

Burns, Shelley, were with us, — they w^atch from their 
graves! 
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, 15 

— He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! 

II 

We shall march prospering, — not thro' his presence; 

Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre; 
Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quiescence, 

Still bidding crouch w^hom the rest bade aspire: 20 

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more. 

One task more declined, one more footpath untrod. 
One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels, 

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! 
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! 25 

There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, 
Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twilight, 

Never glad confident morning again ! 
Best fight on w^ell, for we taught him — strike gallantly, 

Menace our heart ere we master his own; 30 

Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us. 

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! 



The Patriot n 



THE PATRIOT 

AN OLD STORY 



It was roses, roses, all the way. 

With myrtle mixed in my path like mad: 

The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, 
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had, 

A year ago on this very day. 5 

II 

The air broke into a mist with bells, 

The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. 

Had I said, ^'Good folk, mere noise repels — 
But give me your sun from yonder skies!'' 

They had answered, ^'And afterward, what else?" 10 

III 

Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun 

To give it my loving friends to keep! 
Naught man could do, have I left undone: 

And you see my harvest, what I reap 
This very day, now a year is run. 15 

There 's nobody on the house-tops now — 
Just a palsied few at the windows set; 

For the best of the sight is, all allow. 
At the Shambles' Gate — or, better yet, 

By the very scaffold's foot, I trow. 20 



12 Incident of the French Camp 



I go in the rain, and, more than needs, 

A rope cuts both my wrists behind; 
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, 

For they fling, whoever has a mind, 
Stones at me for my year's misdeeds. 25 

VI 

Thus I entered, and thus I go! 

In triumphs, people have dropped down dead. 
^^Paid by the world, what dost thou owe 

Me?" — God might question; now instead, 
'T is God shall repay: I am safer so. 30 



INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP 



You know, we French stormed Ratisbon: 

A mile or so away. 
On a little mound, Napoleon 

Stood on our storming-day; 
With neck out-thrust, you fancy how, 5 

Legs wide, arms locked behind, 
As if to balance the prone brow 

Oppressive with its mind. 

II 
Just as perhaps he mused "My plans 

That soar, to earth may fall, 10 

Let once my army-leader Lannes 

Waver at yonder wair' — 



Incident of the French Camp 13 

Out 'twixt the battery-smokes there flew 

A rider, bound on bound 
Full-galloping; nor bridle drew 15 

Until he reached the mound. 

in 

Then off there flung in smiling joy, 

And held himself erect 
By just his horse's mane, a boy: 

You hardly could suspect — , 20 

(So tight he kept his lips compressed, 

Scarce any blood came through) 
You looked twice ere you saw his breast 

Was all but shot in two. 

IV 

''Well,'' cried he, ''Emperor, by God's grace 25 

We 've got you Ratisbon! 
The Marshal 's in the market-place. 

And you '11 be there anon 
To see your flag-bird flap his vans 

Where I, to heart's desire, 30 

Perched him!" The chief's eye flashed; his plans 

Soared up again Uke fire. 



The chief's eye flashed; but presently 

Softened itself, as sheathes 
A film the mother-eagle's eye 35 

When her bruised eaglet breathes. 
"You 're wounded!" "Nay," the soldier's pride 

Touched to the quick, he said: 
"I 'm killed. Sire!" And his chief beside, 

Smiling the boy fell dead. , 40 



14 The Italian in England 



THE ITALIAN IN ENGLAND 

That second time they hunted me 

From hill to plain, from shore to sea, 

And Austria, hounding far and wide 

Her blood-hounds thro' the country-side. 

Breathed hot and instant on my trace, — 5 

I made six days a hiding-place 

Of that dry green old aqueduct 

Where I and Charles, when boys, have plucked 

The fire-flies from the roof above. 

Bright creeping thro' the moss they love: 10 

— How long it seems since Charles was lost! 

Six days the soldiers crossed and crossed 

The country in my very sight; 

And when that peril ceased at night. 

The sky broke out in red dismay 15 

With signal-fires; well, there I lay 

Close covered o'er in my recess. 

Up to the neck in ferns and cress. 

Thinking on Metternich our friend. 

And Charles's miserable end, 20 

And much beside, two days; the third. 

Hunger o'er came me when I heard 

The peasants from the village go 

To work among the maize; you know. 

With us in Lombardy, they bring 25 

Provisions packed on mules, a string 

With little bells that cheer their task, 

And casks, and boughs on every cask 

To keep the sun's heat from the wine; 

These I let pass in jingling line, 30 



The Italian in England 15 

And, close on them, dear noisy crew. 

The peasants from the village, too; 

For at the very rear would troop 

Their wives and sisters in a group 

To help, I knew. When these had passed, 35 

I threw my glove to strike the last, 

Taking the chance: she did not start, 

Much less cry out, but stooped apart, 

One instant rapidly glanced round. 

And saw me beckon from the ground: 40 

A wild bush grows and hides my crypt ; 

She picked my glove up while she stripped 

A branch off, then rejoined the rest 

With that; my glove lay in her breast. 

Then I drew breath; they disappeared: 45 

It was for Italy I feared. 

An hour, and she returned alone 
Exactly where my glove was thrown. 
Meanwhile came many thoughts: on me 
Rested the hopes of Italy. 50 

I had devised a certain tale 
Which, when 'twas told her, could not fail 
Persuade a peasant of its truth; 
I meant to call a freak of youth 
This hiding, and gives hopes of pay, 55 

And no temptation to betray. 
But when I saw that woman's face, 
Its calm simplicity of grace, 
Our Italy's own attitude 

In which she walked thus far, and stood, 60 

Planting each naked foot so firm, 
To crush the snake and spare the worm— 



l6 The Italian in England 

At first sight of her eyes, I said, 
*'I am that man upon whose head 
They fix the price, because I hate 65 

The Austrians over us: the State 
Will give you gold — oh, gold so much! — 
If you betray me to their clutch, 
And be your death, for aught I know. 
If once they find you saved their foe. 70 

Now, you m.ust bring me food and drink, 
And also paper, pen and ink. 
And carry safe what I shall write 
To Padua, which you '11 reach at night 
Before the duomo shuts; go in, ^ 75 

And wait till Tenebrae begin; 
Walk to the third confessional, 
Between the pillar and the wall, 
And kneeling whisper. Whence comes peace? 
Say it a second time, then cease; 80 

And if the voice inside returns, 
From Christ and Freedom; what concerns 
The cause of Peace? — for answer, shp 
My letter where you placed your lip; 
Then come back happy we have done 85 

Our mother service-^I, the son. 
As you the daughter of our land!" 

Three mornings more, she took her stand 
In the same place, with the same eyes: 
I was no surer of sun-rise 90 

Than of her coming. We conferred 
Of her own prospects, and I heard 
She had a lover — stout and tall. 
She said— then let her eyelids fall, 



The Italian in England 17 

"He could do much'' — as if some doubt 95 

Entered her heart, — then, passing out, 
"She could not speak for others, who 

Had other thoughts; herself she knew:" 

And so she brought me drink and food. 

After four days, the scouts pursued 100 

Another path; at last arrived 

The help my Paduan friends contrived 

To furnish me: she brought the news. 

For the first time I could not choose 

But kiss her hand, and lay my own 105 

Upon her head — "This faith was shown 

To Italy, our mother; she 

Uses my hand and blesses thee." 

She followed down to the sea-shore; 

I left and never saw her more. no 

How very long since I have thought 
Concerning — much less wished for — aught 
Beside the good of Italy, 
For which I live and mean to die ! 
I never was in love; and since 115 

Charles proved false, what shall now convince 
My inmost heart I have a friend? 
However, if I pleased to spend 
Real wishes on myself — say, three — 
I know at least what one should be. 120 

I would grasp Metternich until 
I felt his red wet throat distil 
In blood thro' these two hands. And next, 
— Nor much for that am I perplexed — 
Charles, perjured traitor, for his part, 125 

Should die slow of a broken heart 



i8 The Italian in England 

Under his new employers . Last 

— ^Ah, there, what should I wish? For fast 

Do I grow old and out of strength. 

If I resolved to seek at length 130 

My father's house again, how scared 

They all would look, and unprepared! 

My brothers live in Austria's pay 

— Disowned me long ago, men say; 

And all my early mates who used 135 

To praise me so — ^perhaps induced 

More than one early step of mine — 

Are turning wise: while some opine 
*^ Freedom grows license," some suspect 
*^ Haste breeds delay/' and recollect 140 

They always said, such premature 

Beginnings never could endure! 

So, with a sullen ^'All 's for best," 

The land seems settling to its rest. 

I think then, I should wish to stand 145 

This evening in that dear, lost land, 

Over the sea the thousand miles. 

And know if yet that woman smiles 

With the calm smile; some little farm 

She lives in there, no doubt: what harm 150 

If I sat on the door-side bench. 

And while her spindle made a trench 

Fantastically in the dust. 

Inquired of all her fortunes — ^just 

Her children's ages and their names, 155 

And what may be the husband's aims 

For each of them. I 'd talk this out. 

And sit there, for an hour about, 



Herve Riel 19 

Then kiss her hand once more, and lay 

Mine on her head, and go my way. 160 

So much for idle wishing — how 

It steals the time! To business now. 



HERVE RIEL 

I 

On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety- 
two 
Did the EngHsh fight the French, — woe to France ! 

And, the thirty-first of ]\Iay, helter-skelter thro' the 
blue, 

Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks 
pursue, 
Came crowding ship on ship to Saint-Malo on the 
Ranee, 5 

With the English fleet in view. 

II 

'T was the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full 
chase; 
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Dam- 
freville; 
Close on him fled, great and small, 
Twenty- two good ships in all; 10 

And they signaled to the place 
^^Help the winners of a race! 

Get us guidance, give us harbor, take us quick — or, 

quicker still. 
Here 's the Enghsh can and will ! " 



20 Herve Riel 

III 

Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leapt on 

board; 15 

"Why, what hope or chance have ships hke these to 

pass?" laughed they: 

"Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage scarred 

and scored, — 
Shall the ^ Formidable^ here, with her twelve and eighty 
guns. 
Think to make the river-mouth by the single narrow 
way, 
Trust to enter — where 't is ticklish for a craft of twenty 
tons, 20 

And with flow at full beside? 
Now, 't is slackest ebb of tide. 
Reach the mooring? Rather say, 
While rock stands or water runs. 
Not a ship will leave the bay ! " 25 

IV 

Then was called a council straight. 

Brief and bitter the debate: 

"Here 's the English at our heels; would you have them 

take in tow 
All that 's left us of the fleet, linked together stern and bow. 
For a prize to Plymouth Soimd? 30 

Better run the ships aground!" 
. (Ended Damfreville his speech). 
Not a minute more to wait! 

"Let the Captains all and each 

Shove ashore, then blow up, burn the vessels on the beach ! 
France must undergo her fate. 36 



Herve Riel 21 



"Give the word!'' But no such word 
Was ever spoke or heard; 

For up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid all these 

— A Captain? A Lieutenant? A Mate — ^first, second, 

third? 40 

No such man of mark, and meet 

With his betters to compete! 

But a simple Breton sailor pressed by Tourville for the 
fleet, 
A poor coasting-pilot he, Herve Riel the Croisickese. 

VI 

And, "What mockery or malice have we here? " cries Herve 

Riel: 45 

"Are you mad, you Malouins? Are you cowards, fools, 

or rogues? 

Talk to me of rocks and shoals, me who took the soundings, 

tell 
On my fingers every bank, every shallow, every swell 
'Twixt the ofiing here and Greve where the river disem- 
bogues? 
Are you bought by English gold? Is it love the lying 's 
for? 50 

Morn and eve, night and day. 
Have I piloted your bay, 
Entered free and anchored fast at the foot of SoHdor. 
Burn the fleet and ruin France? That were worse than 
fifty Hogues! 
Sirs, they know I speak the truth! Sirs, believe me 
there's a way! 55 

Only let me lead the line, 



\ 



22 Herve Riel 

Have the biggest ship to steer, 

Get this ' Formidable ' clear, 
Make the others follow mine, 
And I lead them, most and least, by a passage I know well, 

Right to Solidor past Greve, 6i 

And there lay them safe and sound; 

And if one ship misbehave, 

— Keel so much as grate the ground. 
Why, I Ve nothing but my life, — here 's my head!'' cries 
Herve Riel. , 65 

VII 

Not a minute more to wait. 

*^ Steer us in, then, small and great! 

Take the helm, lead the line, save the squadron!" cried 
its chief. 
Captains, give the sailor place! 

He is Admiral, in brief. 70 

Still the north- wind, by God's grace! 
See the noble fellow's face 
As the big ship, with a bound, 
Clears the entry like a hound. 

Keeps the passage, as its inch of way were the wide sea's 
profound! 75 

See, safe thro' shoal and rock. 

How they follow in a flock. 
Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates the 
ground. 

Not a spar that comes to grief! 
The peril, see, is past. 80 

All are harbored to the last. 

And just as Herve Riel hollas '^Anchor!" — sure as fate, 
Up the English come, — too late! 



Herve Riel 23 

VIII 

So, the storm subsides to calm: 

They see the green trees wave 85 

On the heights overlooking Greve. 
Hearts that bled are stanched with balm. 
^^ Just our rapture to enhance, 

Let the English rake the bay, 
Gnash their teeth and glare askance 90 

As they cannonade away! 
'Neath rampired Solidor pleasant riding on the Ranee!" 
How hope succeeds despair on each Captain's counte- 
nance! 
Out burst all with one accord, 

^^This is Paradise for Hell! 95 

Let France, let France's King 

Thank the man that did the thing!" 
What a shout, and all one word, 

^^ Herve Riel!" 
As he stepped in front once more, 100 

Not a symptom of surprise 

In the frank blue Breton eyes. 
Just the same man as before. 

IX 

Then said Damfreville, ''My friend, 

I must speak out at the end, 105 

Tho' I find the speaking hard. 
Praise is deeper than the lips: 
You have saved the King his ships. 

You must name your own reward. 
'Faith our sun was near eclipse! no 



24 Herve Riel 

Demand whatever you will, 
France remains your debtor still. 

Ask to heart's content and have! or my name's not 
Damfreville/' 



Then a beam of fun outbroke 

On the bearded mouth that spoke, 115 

As the honest heart laughed through 

Those frank eyes of Breton blue: 

*^ Since I needs must say my say. 

Since on board the duty 's done, 

And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but 
a run? — 120 

Since 't is ask and have, I may — 

Since the others go ashore — 
Come! A good whole holiday! 

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle 
Aurore!" 
That he asked and that he got, — nothing more. 125 

XI 

Name and deed alike are lost: 
Not a pillar nor a post 

In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; 
Not a head in white and black 

On a single fishing smack, 130 

In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack 

All that France saved from the fight whence England 
bore the bell. 
Go to Paris: rank on rank 

Search the heroes flung pell-mell 
On the Louvre, face and flank! 135 



Pheidippides 25 

You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. 
So, for better and for worse, 
Herve Riel, accept my verse! 
In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more 
Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife the Belle 
Aurore! 140 



PHEIDIPPIDES 

First I salute this soil of the blessed, river and rock! 
Gods of my birthplace, daemons and heroes, honor to all! 
Then I name thee, claim thee for our patron, co-equal in 

praise 
— ^Ay, with Zeus the Defender, with Her of the aegis and 

spear! 
Also, ye of the bow and the buskin, praised be your peer, 5 
Now, henceforth and forever, — O latest to whom I upraise 
Hand and heart and voice ! For Athens, leave pasture and 

flock! 
Present to help, potent to save, Pan — patron I call! 

Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I return! 

See, 't is myself here standing alive, no specter that speaks! 

Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens 
and you, 1 1 

'^Rim, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid! 

Persia has come, we are here, where is She?'' Your com- 
mand I obeyed. 

Ran and raced: like stubble, some field which a fire runs 
through. 



26 Pheidippides 

Was the space between city and city: two days, two nights 
did I burn 15 

Over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks. 



Into their midst I broke: breath served but for "Persia has 

come ! 
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and 

earth; 
Razed to the ground is Eretria — but Athens, shall Athens 

sink. 
Drop into dust and die — the flower of Hellas utterly die, 20 
Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the 

stander-by? 
Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er 

destruction's brink? 
How, — ^when? No care for my limbs! — there 's lightning 

in all and some — 
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth! '' 

O my Athens — Sparta love thee? Did Sparta respond? 25 

Every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust. 

Malice, — each eye of her gave me its glitter of gratified 
hate! 

Gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for excuses. 
I stood 

Quivering, — the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch 
from dry wood : 

''Persia has come, Athens asks aid, and still they debate? 

Thunder, thou Zeus! Athene, are Spartans a quarry be- 
yond 31 

Swing of thy spear? Phoibos and Artemis, clang them 
'Ye must'!'' 



Pheidippides 27 

No bolt launched from Olumpos ! Lo, their answer at last ! 

'^Has Persia come, — does Athens ask aid, — may Sparta be- 
friend? 

Nowise precipitate judgment — too weighty the issue at 
stake! 35 

Count we no time lost time which lags thro' respect to the 
Gods! 

Ponder that precept of old, ' No warfare, whatever the odds 

In your favor, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is unable to 
take 

Full-circle her state in the sky!' Already she rounds to it 
fast: 

Athens must wait, patient as we — who judgment suspend." 

Athens, — except for that sparkle, — thy name, I had mould- 
ered to ash! 41 

That sent a blaze thro' my blood; off, off and away was I 
back, 

— Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and 
the vile! 

Yet ^' O Gods of my land ! " I cried, as each hillock and plain. 

Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past them 
again, ^ 45 

^^ Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honors we paid you 
erew^hile? 

Vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! Too 
rash 

Love in its choice, paid you so largely servdce so slack! 

''Oak and olive and bay, — I bid you cease to enwreathe 
Brows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Persian's foot. 
You that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a 
slave! 51 



28 Pheidippides 

Rather I hail thee, Parnes, — trust to thy wild waste tract! 
Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain ! What matter if slacked 
My speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to cave 
No deity deigns to drape with verdure? — at least I can 
breathe, 55 

Fear in thee no fraud from the blind^ no lie from the mute! '' 

Such my cry as, rapid, I ran over Parnes' ridge; 
Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, a bar 
Jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way. 
Right! for I minded the hollow to traverse, the fissure 

across: 60 

"Where I could enter, there I depart by! Night in the 

fosse? 
Athens to aid? Tho' the dive were thro' Erebos, thus I 

obey — 
Out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! No 

bridge 
Better!" — when — ha! what was it I came on, of wonders 

that are? 



There, in the cool of a cleft, sat he — majestical Pan! 65 
Ivy drooped wanton, kissed his head, moss cushioned his 

hoof: 
All the great God was good in the eyes grave-kindly — the 

curl 
Carved on the bearded cheek, amused at a mortal's awe. 
As, under the human trunk, the goat- thighs grand I saw. 
"Halt, Pheidippides! " — halt I did, my brain of a whirl: 70 
"Hither to me! Why pale in my presence?" he gracious 

began : 
" How is it, — Athens, only in Hellas, holds me aloof? 



Pheidippides 29 

"Athens, she only, rears me no fane, makes me no feast! 

Wherefore? Than I what godship to Athens more helpful 
of old? 

Ay, and still, and forever her friend! Test Pan, trust me! 

Go, bid Athens take heart, laugh Persia to scorn, have 
faith y6 

In the temples and tombs! Go, say to Athens, 'The Goat- 
God saith: 

When Persia — so much as strews not the soil — is cast in 
the sea. 

Then praise Pan who fought in the ranks with your most 
and least, 

Goat-thigh to greaved-thigh, made one cause with the free 
and the bold!' 80 

''Say Pan saith: 'Let this, foreshowing the place, be the 

pledge!'" 
(Gay, the liberal hand held out this herbage I bear 
— Fennel, — I grasped it a-tremble with dew — whatever it 

bode), 
''While, as for thee . . .'' But enough! He was gone. If 

I ran hitherto — 
Be sure that the rest of my journey, I ran no longer, but 

flew. 85 

Parnes to Athens — earth no more, the air was my road: 
Here am I back. Praise Pan, we stand no more on the 

razor's edge! 
Pan for Athens, Pan for me! I too have a guerdon rare! 



Then spoke Miltiades. "And thee, best rimner of Greece, 
Whose limbs did duty indeed, — what gift is promised thy- 
self? 90 



30 Pheidippides 

Tell it us straightway, — Athens the mother demands of 

her son!" 
Rosily blushed the youth: he paused: but, lifting at length 
His eyes from the ground, it seemed as he gathered the 

rest of his strength 
Into the utterance — '^ Pan spoke thus: ' For what thou hast 

done 
Count on a worthy reward! Henceforth be allowed thee 

release 95 

From the racer's toil, no vulgar reward in praise or in pelf ! ' 

^^I am bold to beheve, Pan means reward the most to my 

mind! 
Fight I shall, with our foremost, wherever this fennel may 

grow,— 
Pound — Pan helping us — Persia to dust, and, under the 

deep, 99 

Whelm her away forever; and then, — no Athens to save,— 
Marry a certain maid, I know keeps faith to the brave, — 
Hie to my house and home: and, when my children shall 

creep 
Close to my knees, — recount how the God was awful yet 

kind. 
Promised their sire reward to the full — rewarding him — so!'' 



Unforseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day: 
So, when Persia was dust, all cried ^^To Akropolis! 106 
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due! 
^Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!" He flung down 

his shield. 
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel- 
field 



Home Thoughts from Abroad 31 

And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs 
through, no 

Till in he broke : '' Rejoice, we conquer ! " Like wine through 
clay, 

Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died — the bhss! 

So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of 

salute 
Is still ^^ Rejoice!" — his word which brought rejoicing in- 
deed. 
So is Pheidippides happy forever, — the noble strong man 
Who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a 
god loved so well; 116 

He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was 

suffered to tell 
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began. 
So to end gloriously — once to shout, thereafter be mute: 
*^ Athens is saved! " — Pheidippides dies in the shout for his 
meed. 120 



HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD 

Oh, to be in England now that April 's there. 
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, un- 
aware. 
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf. 
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 5 

In England — now! 

And after April, when May follows. 

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows! 



32 Up at a Villa — Down in the City 

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover lo 

Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's edge — 
That 's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture! 

And, tho' the fields look rough with hoary dew, 15 

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew 
The buttercups, the little children's dower 
— Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! 



HOME THOUGHTS FROM THE SEA 

Nobly, nobly Cape St. Vincent to the Northwest died away; 

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; 

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; 

In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar 
grand and gray; 

"" Here and here did England help me: how can I help Eng- 
land? " — say, S 

Who so turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and 
pray. 

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. 



UP AT A VILLA— DOWN IN THE CITY 

(as distinguished by an ITALIAN PERSON OF QUALITY) 

I 

Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, 
The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; 
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there! 



Up at a Villa — Down in the City 33 

n 

Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least! 
There, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; 5 
While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more than a 
beast. 

Ill 

Well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull 
Just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature's skull, 
Save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull ! 
— I scratch my ow^n, sometimes, to see if the hair 's turned 
wool. 10 

IV 

But the city, oh the city — the square with the houses! 
Why? 

They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there 's something 
to take the eye! 

Houses in four straight hues, not a single front awry; 

•You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who 
hurries by; 

Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun 
gets high; ^ ^ 15 

And the shops wdth fanciful signs which are painted prop- 
erly. 

V 

What of a villa? Tho' winter be over in March by rights, 

'T is May perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well 
off the heights: 

You Ve the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen 
steam and wheeze. 

And the hills over-smoked behind by the faint gray olive- 
trees. 20 



34 Up at a Villa — Down in the City 

VI 

Is it better in May, I ask you? You Ve summer all at 

once; 
In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April suns. 
'Mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three 

fingers well, 
The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red 

bell 
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick 

and sell. 25 

VII 

Is it ever hot in the square? There 's a fountain to spout 
and splash! 

In the shade it sings and springs; in the shine such foam- 
bows flash 

On the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and pad- 
dle and pash 

Round the lady atop in her conch — ^fifty gazers do not 
abash, 

Tho' all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a 
sort of sash. 30 

VIII 

All the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you 
linger, 

Except yon cypress that points like death's lean lifted fore- 
finger. 

Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix i' the corn and 
mingle. 

Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem 
a-tingle. 



Up at a Villa — Down in the City 35 

Late August or early September, the stimning cicala is 
shrill, 35 

And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous 
firs on the hill. 

Enough of the seasons, — I spare you the months of the 
fever and chill. 

IX 

Ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church- 
bells begin : 

No sooner the bells leave off than the dihgence rattles in: 

You get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin. 

By and by there 's the traveling doctor gives pills, lets 
blood, draws teeth; 41 

Or the Pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath. 

At the post-office such a scene-picture — the new play, pip- 
ing hot! 

And a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves 
were shot. 

Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, 

And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new 
law of the Duke's! 46 

Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So- 
and-so 

Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, St. Jerome and Cicero, 

^'And moreover,'' (the sonnet goes rhyming,) ^Hhe skirts 
of St. Paul has reached. 

Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous 
than ever he preached." 50 

Noon strikes, — here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne 
smiling and smart 

With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords 
stuck in her heart! 



36 Up at a Villa — Down in the City 

Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the 

fife; 
No keeping one's haunches still: it 's the greatest pleasure 

in life. 

X 

But bless you, it 's dear — it 's dear! fowls, wine, at double 

the rate. 55 

They have clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil pays 

passing the gate 
It 's a horror to think of. And so, the villa for me, not the 

city! 
Beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still — ah, the pity, 

the pity ! 
Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls 

and sandals. 
And the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding the 

yellow candles; 60 

One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with 

handles, 
And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better 

prevention of scandals: 
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the 

fife. 
Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in 

life! 



Confessions 37 

CONFESSIONS 

I 

What is he buzzing in my ears? 

*^Now that I come to die, 
Do I view the world as a vale of tears? '* 

Ah, reverend sir, not I ! 

II 

What I viewed there once, what I view again 5 

Where the physic bottles stand 
On the. table's edge, — is a suburb lane. 

With a wall to my bedside hand. 

Ill 

That lane sloped, much as the bottles do. 

From a house you could descry 10 

O'er the garden- wall: is the curtain blue 
Or green to a healthy eye? 

IV 

To mine, it serves for the old June weather 

Blue above lane and wall; 
And that farthest bottle labeled ^' Ether" 15 

Is the house o'er-topping all. 

V 

At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, 

There watched for me, one June, 
A girl: I know, sir, it 's improper, 

My poor mind 's out of time 20 



38 A Face 

VI 

Only, there was a way . . . you crept 

Close by the side, to dodge 
Eyes in the house, two eyes except: 

They styled their house ^^The Lodge/' 

VII 

What right had a lounger up their lane? 25 

But, by creeping very close, 
With the good wall's help, — their eyes might strain 

And stretch themselves to Oes, 

VIII 

Yet never catch her and me together, 

As she left the attic, there, 30 

By the rim of the bottle labeled "Ether,'' 

And stole from stair to stair, 

IX 

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, 

We loved, sir — used to meet: 
How sad and bad and mad it was — 35 

But then, how it was sweet! 

A FACE 

If one could have that little head of hers 

Painted upon a background of pale gold. 

Such as the Tuscan's early art prefers! 

No shade encroaching on the matchless mould 

Of those two lips, which should be opening soft 5 

In the pure profile; not as when she laughs, 

For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft 



Evelyn Hope 39 

Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff's 

Burthen of honey-colored buds, to kiss 

And capture 'twixt the lips apart for this. 10 

Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround, 

How it should waver, on the pale gold ground, 

Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts! 

I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts 

Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb 15 

Breaking its outhne, burning shades absorb: 

But these are only massed there, I should think, 

Waiting to see some wonder momently 

Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky, 

(That 's the pale ground you 'd see this sweet face by) 20 

All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye 

Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink. 

EVELYN HOPE 



Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead! 

Sit and watch by her side an hour. 
That is her book-shelf, this her bed; 

She plucked that piece of geranium-flower, 
Beginning to die too, in the glass; 5 

Little has yet been changed, I think: 
The shutters are shut, no light may pass 

Save two long rays thro' the hinge's chink. 

II 

Sixteen years old when she died ! 

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; 10 

It was not her time to love; beside. 

Her Hfe had many a hope and aim. 



40 Evelyn Hope 

Duties enough and little cares, 

And now was quiet, now astir, 
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, — 15 

And the sweet white brow is all of her. 

Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope? 

What, your soul was pure and true. 
The good stars met in your horoscope. 

Made you of spirit, fire and dew — 20 

And, just because I was thrice as old 

And our paths in the world diverged so wide, 
Each was naught to each, must I be told? 

We were fellow mortals, naught beside? 

IV 

No, indeed! for God above 25 

Is great to grant, as mighty to make. 
And creates the love to reward the love: 

I claim you still, for my own love's sake! 
Delayed it may be for more lives yet. 

Thro' worlds I shall traverse, not a few: 30 

Much is to learn, much to forget 

Ere the time be come for taking you. 

V 

But the time will come, — at last it will. 

When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) 
In the lower earth, in the years long still, 35 

That body and soul so pure and gay? 
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine. 

And your mouth of your own geranium's red — 
And what you would do with me, in fine, 

In the new life come in the old one's stead. 4c 



Love Among the Ruins 41 

VI 

I have Hved (I shall say) so much since then, 

Given up myself so many times, 
Gained me the gains of various men, 

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; 
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, - 45 

Either I missed or itself missed me: 
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! 

What is the issue? let us see ! 

VII 

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while 

My heart seemed full as it could hold; 50 

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile. 

And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. 
So hush, — I will give you this leaf to keep: 

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand ! 
There, that is our secret: go to sleep! 55 

You will wake, and remember, and understand. 



LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 



Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles. 

Miles and miles 
On the solitary pastures where our sheep 

Half-asleep 
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop 5 

As they crop — 
Was the site once of a city great and gay, 

(So they say) 



42 Love Among the Ruins 

Of our country's very capital, its prince 

Ages since lo 

Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far 

Peace or war. 



II 

Now, — the country does not even boast a tree 

As you see, 
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills 15 

From the hills 
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run 

Into one) 
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires 

Up like fires 20 

O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall 

Bounding all. 
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed, 

Twelve abreast. 

Ill 

And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass 25 

Never was ! 
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, overspreads 

And embeds 
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone. 

Stock or stone — 30 

Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe 

Long ago; 
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame 

Struck them tame; 
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold 35 

Bought and sold. 



Love Among the Ruins 43 ■ 

IV 

Now, — the single httle turret that remains 

On the plains. 
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd 

Over scored, 40 

While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks 

Thro' the chinks — 
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time 

Sprang sublime. 
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced 45 

As they raced. 
And the monarch and his minions and his dames 

Viewed the games. 

V 

And I know — while thus the quiet-colored eve 

Smiles to leave 50 

To their folding, all our many tinkling fleece 

In such peace. 
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray 

Melt away — 
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair 55 

Waits me there 
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul 

For the goal. 
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, 
dumb 

Till I come. 60 

VI 

But he looked upon the city, every side. 

Far and wide. 
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' 

Colonnades, 



44 One Word More 

All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts, — and then, 65 

All the men! 
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, 

Either hand 
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace 

Of my face, 70 

Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech 

Each on each. 

VII 

In one year they sent a million fighters forth 

South and North, 
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high 75 

As the sky, 
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force — 

Gold, of course. 
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! 

Earth's returns 80 

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin ! 

Shut them in. 
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! 

Love is best. 

ONE WORD MORE 

TO E. B. B. 

18SS 
I' 

There they are, my fifty men and women 
Naming me the fifty poems finished! 
. Take them. Love, the book and me together: 
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. 



One Word More 45 

II 
Rafael made a century of sonnets, 5 

Made and wrote them in a certain volume 
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil 
Else he only used to draw Madonnas: 
These, the world might view — ^but one, the volume. 
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you. 10 
Did she live and love it all her life-time? 
Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets, 
Die, and let it drop beside her pillow 
Where it lay in place of RafaeFs glory, 
Rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving — 15 

Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's, 
Rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's? 

Ill 

You and I would rather read that volume, 

(Taken to his beating bosom by it) 

Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael, 20 

Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas — 

Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, 

Her, that visits Florence in a vision. 

Her, that 's left with lilies in the Louvre — 

Seen by us and all the world in circle. 25 

IV 

You and I will never read that volume. 

Guido Reni, like his own eye's apple 

Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it. 

Guido Reni dying, all Bologna 

Cried, and the world cried too, " Ours, the treasure ! " 30 

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. 



46 One Word More 



Dante once prepared to paint an angel : 
Whom to please? You whisper "Beatrice." 
While he mused and traced it and retraced it, 
(Peradventure with a pen corroded 35 

Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for, 
When, his left-hand i' the hair o' the wicked. 
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma. 
Bit into the live man's fiesh for parchment. 
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 40 
Let the wretch go festering through Florence) — 
Dante, who loved well because he hated, 
Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 
Dante standing, studying his angel, — 
In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 45 

Says he — "Certain people of importance 
(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to) 
"Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." 
Says the poet — "Then I stopped my painting." 



VI 

You and I would rather see that angel, 50 

Painted by the tenderness of Dante, 
Would we not? — than read a fresh Inferno. 



VII 

You and I will never see that picture. 

While he mused on love and Beatrice, 

While he softened o'er his outlined angel, 55 

In they broke, those "people of importance:" 

We and Bice bear the loss forever, 



One Word More 47 

VIII 

What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture? 

This: no artist lives and loves, that longs not 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 60 

(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language 

Fit and fair and simple and suflBcient — 

Using nature that 's an art to others. 

Not, this one time, art that 's turned his nature. 

Ay of all the artists living, loving, 65 

None but would forego his proper dowry, — 

Does he paint? he fain would write a poem, — 

Does he write? he fain would paint a picture. 

Put to proof art alien to the artist's. 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 70 

So to be the man and leave the artist, 

Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow. 

IX 

Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement! 
He who smites the rock and spreads the water, 
Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him, 75 

Even he, the minute makes immortal. 
Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute, 
Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing. 
While he smites, how can he but remember, 
So he smote before, in such a peril, 80 

When they stood and mocked — '^ Shall smiting help us?" 
When they drank and sneered — ^^A stroke is easy!" 
When they wiped their mouths and went their journey, 
Throwing him for thanks — "But drought was pleasant." 
Thus old memories mar the actual triumph; 85 

Thus the doing savors of disrelish; 



48 One Word More 

Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat; • 

O'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate, 

Carelessness or consciousness — the gesture. 

For he bears an ancient wrong about him, 90 

Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces, 

Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude — 

"How shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save us?'' 

Guesses what is like to prove the sequel — 

'^Egypt's flesh-pots — nay, the drought was better." 95 



Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant! 
Theirs, the Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance, 
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat. 
Never dares the man put off the prophet. 

XI 

Did he love one face from out the thousands, 100 

(Were she Jethro's daughter, white and wifely. 

Were she but the ^Ethiopian bondslave,) 

He would envy yon dumb patient camel, 

Keeping a reserve of scanty water 

Meant to save his own life in the desert; 105 

Ready in the desert to deliver 

(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened) 

Hoard and life together for his mistress. 

XII 

I shall never, in the years remaining. 

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, no 

Make you music that should all-express me; 

So it seems: I stand on my attainment. 



One Word More 49 

This of verse alone, one life allows me; 

Verse and nothing else have I to give you. 

Other heights in other lives, God willing: 115 

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love! 

xm 

Yet a semblance of resource avails us — 

Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. 

Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, 

Lines I write the first time and the last time. 120 

He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, 

Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, 

Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, 

Makes a strange art of an art famiUar, 

Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. 125 

He who blows thro' bronze, m.ay breathe thro' silver, 

Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess. 

He who writes, may write for once as I do. 

XIV 

Love, you saw me gather men and women. 

Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, 130 

Enter each and all, and use their service. 

Speak from every mouth, — the speech, a poem. 

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 

Hopes and fears, belief and disbeUeving: 

I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's, 135 

Karshish, Cleon, Norbert and the fifty. 

Let me speak this once in my true person. 

Not as Lippo, Roland or Andrea, 

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence: 

Pray you, look on these my men and women, 140 

Take and keep my fifty poems finished; 



50 One Word More 

Where my heart Ues, let my brain He also! 
Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things. 



XV 

Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self! 
Here in London, yonder late in Florence, 145 

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. 
Curving on a sky imbrued with color, 
Drifted over Fiesole by twilight. 
Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. 
Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato, 150 

Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, 
Perfect till the nightingales applauded. 
Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished, 
Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs, 
Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver, 155 

Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. 

XVI 

What, there 's nothing in the moon noteworthy? 

Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal, 

Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy). 

All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos), 160 

She would turn a new side to her mortal, 

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman — 

Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, 

Blind to Galileo on his turret. 

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even! 165 

Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal — 

When she turns round, comes again in heaven, 

Opens out anew for worse or better! 

Proves she like some portent of an iceberg 



One Word More 51 

Swimming full upon the ship it founders, 170 

Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? 

Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire 

Seen by Moses when he dimbed the mountain? 

Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu 

Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest, 175 

Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. 

Like the bodied heaven in his clearness 

Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work, 

When they ate and drank and saw God also! 

XVII 

What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know. 180 

Only this is sure — the sight were other. 

Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence, 

Dying now impoverished here in London. 

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 185 

One to show a woman w^hen he loves her! 



XVIII 

This I say of me, but think of you. Love! 

This to you — ^yourself my moon of poets ! 

Ah, but that 's the world's side, there 's the wonder, 

Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you! 190 

There, in turn I stand with them and praise you — 

Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 

But the best is when I glide from out them, 

Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, 

Come out on the other side, the novel 195 

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of. 

Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 



52 James Lee's Wife 

XIX 

Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, 

Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 

Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 200 

Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom! 

MY STAR 

All that I know 

Of a certain star 
Is, it can throw 

(Like the angled spar) 
Now a dart of red, 5 

Now a dart of blue; 
Till my friends have said 

They would fain see, too. 
My star that dartles the red and the blue! 
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: 10 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
What matter to me if their star is a world? 

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. 

JAMES LEES WIFE 

ON THE CLIFF 
I 

I LEANED on the turf, 

I looked at a rock 

Left dry by the surf; 

For the turf, to call it grass were to mock: 

Dead to the roots, so deep was done 5 

The work of the summer sun. 



James Lee's Wife 53 

n 

And the rock lay flat 

As an anviFs face: 

No iron like that! 

Baked dry: of a weed, of a shell, no trace: 10 

Sunshine outside, but ice at the core, 

Death's altar by the lone shore. 

in 

On the turf, sprang gay 

With his films of blue, 

No cricket, I '11 say, 15 

But a war-horse, barded and chanfroned too. 

The gift of a quixote-mage to his knight. 

Real fairy, with wings all right. 

IV 

On the rock, they scorch 

Like a drop of fire 20 

From a brandished torch. 

Fall two red fans of a butterfly : 

No turf, no rock, — in their ugly stead; 

See, wonderful blue and red! 

V 

Is it not so 25 

With the minds of men? 

The level and low. 

The burnt and bare, in themselves; but then 

With such a blue and red grace, not theirs, — 

Love settHng imawares! 30 



54 Summum Bonum 

SONG 



Nay but you, who do not love her, 

Is she not pure gold, my mistress? 
Holds earth aught — speak truth — above her? 

Aught like this tress, see, and this tress. 
And this last fairest tress of all, 5 

So fair, see, ere I let it fall? 

II 

Because, you spend your lives in praising; 

To praise, you search the wide world over: 
Then why not witness, calmly gazing. 

If earth holds aught — speak truth — above her? 10 
Above this tress, and this, I touch 
But cannot praise, I love so much! 

SUMMUM BONUM 

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one 
bee: 
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of 
one gem: 
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the 
sea: 
Breath and bloom, shade and shine, — wonder, wealth, 
and — how far above them — 

Truth, that 's brighter than gem, 5 

Trust, that 's purer than pearl, — 
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe — all were for me 
In the kiss of one girl. 



The Laboratory 55 



THE LABORATORY 

ANCIEN REGIME 



Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, 
May gaze thro' these faint smokes curling whitely, 
As thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy — 
Which is the poison to poison her, prithee? 

II 

He is with her, and they know that I know 5 

Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow 
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear 
Empty church, to pray God in, for them! — I am here. 

Ill 

Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, 

Pound at thy powder, — I am not in haste! 10 

Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things. 

Than go where men wait me, and dance at the King's. 

IV 

That in the mortar — ^you call it a gum? 

Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! 

And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, 15 

Sure to taste sweetly, — is that poison too? 



Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures, 

What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures! 

To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, 

A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket! 20 



56 The Laboratory 

VI 

Soon, at the King's, a mere lozenge to give 
And PauUne should have just thirty minutes to live! 
But to light a pastile, and Elise, with her head 
And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop 
dead! 

VII 

Quick — ^is it finished? The color 's too grim! 25 

Why not soft like the phiaFs, enticing and dim? 
Let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir, 
And try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer! 

VIII 

What a drop! She 's not little, no minion like me! 
That 's why she ensnared him: this never will free 30 

The soul from those masculine eyes, — say, *'No!'' 
To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go. 

IX 

For only last night, as they whispered, I brought 
My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought 
Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would 
fall 35 

Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all! 



Not that I bid you spare her the pain; 

Let death be felt and the proof remain : 

Brand, burn up, bite into its grace — 

He is sure to remember her dying face! 40 



Count Gismond 57 

XI 

Is it done? Take my mask ofi! Nay, be not morose; 
It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close: 
The delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee! 
If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me? 

XII 

Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, 45 
You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will! 
But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings 
Ere I know it — next moment I dance at the King's! 



COUNT GISMOND 

AIX IN PROVENCE 



Christ God who savest man, save most 
Of men Count Gismond who saved me! 

Count Gauthier, when he chose his post, 
Chose time and place and company 

To suit it; when he struck at length 5 

My honor, 't was with all his strength. 

II 

And doubtlessly ere he could draw 
All points to one, he must have schemed! 

That miserable morning saw 

Few half so happy as I seemed, 10 

While being dressed in queen's array 

To give our tourney prize away. 



58 ^ Count Gismond 

III 

I thought they loved me, did me grace 
To please themselves; 't was all their deed; 

God makes, or fair or foul, our face; 15 

If showing mine so caused to bleed 

My cousins' hearts, they should have dropped 

A word, and straight the play had stopped. 

IV 

They, too, so beauteous! Each a queen 

By virtue of her brow and breast; 20 

Not needing to be crowned, I mean. 
As I do. E'en when I was dressed, 

Had either of them spoke, instead 

Of glancing sideways with still head! 



But no: they let me laugh, and sing 25 

My birthday song quite through, adjust 

The last rose in my garland, fling 
A last look on the mirror, trust 

My arms to each an arm of theirs. 

And so descend the castle-stairs — 30 

VI 

And come out on the morning troop 
Of merry friends who kissed my cheek. 

And called me queen, and made me stoop 
Under the canopy— (a streak 

That pierced it, of the outside sun, 35 

Powdered v/ith gold its gloom's soft dun) — 



Count Gismond 59 

VII 

And they could let me take my state 

And foolish throne amid applause 
Of all come there to celebrate 

My queen's-day — Oh I think the cause 40 

Of much was, they forgot no crowd 
Makes up for parents in their shroud! 

VIII 

However that be, all eyes were bent 

Upon me, when my cousins cast 
Theirs down; 'twas time I should present 45 

The victor's crown, but . . . there, 't will last 
No long time ... the old mist again 
Blinds me as then it did. How vain! 



IX 

See! Gismond 's at the gate, in talk 

With his two boys: I can proceed. 50 

Well, at that moment, who should stalk 

Forth boldly — to my face, indeed — 
But Gauthier, and he thundered ^^Stay!" 
And all stayed. ^^ Bring no crowns, I say! 



"Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet 55 

About her! Let her shun the chaste, 
Or lay herself before their feet! 

Shall she whose body I embraced 
A night long, queen it in the day? 
For honor's sake no crowns, I say ! " 60 



6o Count Gismond 

XI 

I? What I answered? As I live, 

I never fancied such a thing 
An answer possible to give. 

What says the body when they spring 
Some monstrous torture-engine's whole 65 

Strength on it? No more says the soul. 

XII 

Till out strode Gismond; then I knew 

That I was saved. I never met 
His face before, but, at first view, 

I felt quite sure that God had set 70 

Himself to Satan: who would spend 
A minute's mistrust on the end? 



XIII 

He strode to Gauthier, in his throat 
Gave him the lie, then struck his mouth 

With one back-handed blow that wrote 75 

In blood men's verdict there. North, South, 

East, West, I looked. The lie was dead. 

And damned, and truth stood up instead. 

XIV 

This glads me most, that I enjoyed 

The heart of the joy, with my content 80 

In watching Gismond unalloyed 

By any doubt of the event: 
God took that on him — I was bid 
Watch Gismond for my part: I did. 



Count Gismond 6l 

XV 

Did I not watch him while he let 85 

His armorer just brace his greaves, 
Rivet his hauberk, on the fret 

The while! His foot . . . my memory leaves 
No least stamp out, nor how anon 
He pulled his ringing gauntlets on. 90 

XVI 

And e'en before the trumpet's sound 
Was finished, prone lay the false knight. 

Prone as his lie, upon the ground: 
Gismond flew at him, used no sleight 

0' the sword, but open-breasted drove, 95 

Cleaving till out the truth he clove. 

XVII 

Which done, he dragged him to my feet 
And said, ^^Here die, but end thy breath 

In full confession, lest thou fleet 

From my first, to God's second death! 100 

Say, hast thou lied?" And, ^'I have lied 

To God and her," he said, and died. 

XVIII 

Then Gismond, kneeUng to me, asked 

— What safe my heart holds, though no word 

Could I repeat now, if I tasked 105 

My powers forever, to a third 

Dear even as you are. Pass the rest 

Until I sank upon his breast. 



62 The Glove 

XIX 

Over my head his arm he flung 

Against the world; and scarce I felt no 

His sword (that dripped by me and swung) 

A little shifted in its belt: 
For he began to say the while 
How South our home lay many a mile. 

XX 

So, 'mid the shouting multitude 115 

We two walked forth to never more 

Return. My cousins have pursued 
Their life, untroubled as before 

I vexed them. Gauthier's dwelling-place 

God lighten! May his soul find grace! 120 

XXI 

Our elder boy has got the clear 

Great brow; tho' when his brother's black 

Full eye shows scorn, it . . . Gismond here? 
And have you brought my tercel back? 

I was just telling Adela 125 

How many birds it struck since May. 



THE GLOVE 

(peter ronsard loquitur) 

"Heigho!" yawned one day King Francis, 
^'Distance all value enhances! 
When a man 's busy, why, leisure 
Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 



The Glove 63 

'Faith, and at leisure once is he? 5 

Straightway he wants to be busy. 

Here we Ve got peace; and aghast I 'm 

Caught thinking war the true pastime. 

Is there a reason in meter? 

Give us your speech, master Peter!'' 10 

I who, if mortal dare say so. 

Ne'er am at loss with my Naso, 

"Sire," I replied, "joys prove cloudlets: 

Men are the merest Ixions" — 

Here the King whistled aloud, "Let 's 15 

. . . Heigho . . . go look at our lions!" 

Such are* the sorrowful chances 

If you talk fine to King Francis. 

And so, to the courtyard proceeding, 

Our company, Francis was leading, 20 

Increased by new followers tenfold 

Before he arrived at the penfold; 

Lords, ladies, like clouds which bedizen 

At sunset the western horizon. 

And Sir De Lorge pressed 'mid the foremost 25 

With the dame he professed to adore most. 

Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed 

Her, and the horrible pitside; 

For the penfold surrounded a hollow 

Which led where the eye scarce dared follow, 30 

And shelved to the chamber secluded 

Where Bluebeard, the great lion, brooded. 

The King hailed his keeper, an Arab 

As glossy and black as a scarab. 

And bade him make sport and at once stir 35 

Up and out of his den the old monster, 



64 The Glove 

They opened a hole in the wire-work 

Across it, and dropped there a firework, 

And fled: one's heart's beating redoubled; 

A pause, while the pit's mouth was troubled, 40 

The blackness and silence so utter. 

By the firework's slow sparkling and sputter; 

Then earth in a sudden contortion 

Gave out to our gaze her abortion. 

Such a brute! Were I friend Clement Marot 45 

(Whose experience of nature 's but narrow. 

And whose faculties move in no small mist 

When he versifies David the Psalmist) 

I should study that brute to describe you 

Ilium Juda Leonem de Tribu. 50 

One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy 

To see the black mane, vast and heapy, 

The tail in the air stiff and straining. 

The wide eyes, nor waxing nor weaning. 

As over the barrier which bounded 55 

His platform, and us who surrounded 

The barrier, they reached and they rested 

On space that might stand him in best stead: 

For who knew, he thought, what the amazement, 

The eruption of clatter and blaze meant, 60 

And if, in this minute of wonder, 

No outlet, 'mid lightning and thunder. 

Lay broad, and, his shackles all shivered. 

The lion at last was delivered? 

Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead! 65 

And you saw by the flash on his forehead. 

By the hope in those eyes wide and steady, 

He was leagues in the desert already. 

Driving the flocks up the mountain^ 



The Glove 65 

Or catlike couched hard by the fountain 70 

To waylay the date-gathering negress: 

So guarded he entrance or egress. 

^^How he stands!" quoth the King: ^^we may well swear, 

(No novice, we Ve won our spurs elsewhere 

And so can afford the confession,) 75 

We exercise wholesome discretion 

In keeping aloof from his threshold, 

Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold. 

Their first would too pleasantly purloin 

The visitor's brisket or sirloin: 80 

But who 's he would prove so fool-hardy? 

Not the best man of Marignan, pardie!'' 

The sentence no sooner was uttered, 

Than over the rails a glove fluttered. 

Fell close to the lion, and rested: 85 

The dame 't was, who flung it and jested 

With life so, De Lorge had been wooing 

For months past; he sat there pursuing 

His suit, weighing out with nonchalance 

Fine speeches like gold from a balance. 90 

Sound the trumpet, no true knight 's a tarrier! 

De Lorge made one leap at the barrier. 

Walked straight to the glove, — while the lion 

Ne'er moved, kept his far-reaching eye on 

The palm-tree-edged desert-spring's sapphire, 95 

And the musky oiled skin of the Kaffir, — 

Picked it up, and as calmly retreated. 

Leaped back where the lady was seated, 

And full in the face of its owner 

Flung the glove. 



66 The Glove 

^* Your heart's queen, you dethrone her? loo 
So should I!" — cried the King — ^* 'twas mere vanity, 
Not love, set that task to humanity!'' 
Lords and ladies alike turned with loathing 
From such a proved wolf in sheep's clothing. 

Not so, I; for I caught an expression 105 

In her brow's undisturbed self-possession 

Amid the Court's scoffing and merriment, — 

As if from no pleasing experiment 

She rose, yet of pain not much heedful 

So long as the process was needful, — no 

As if she had tried in a crucible, 

To what ^^ speeches like gold" were reducible. 

And, finding the finest prove copper. 

Felt the smoke in her face was but proper; 

To know what she had not to trust to, 115 

Was worth all the ashes and dust too. 

She went out 'mid hooting and laughter; 

Clement Marot stayed; I followed after, 

And asked, as a grace, what it all meant? 

If she wished not the rash deed's recallment? 120 

''For I" — so I spoke — *'am a poet: 

Human nature — ^behoves that I know it!" 

She told me, ''Too long had I heard ; 

Of the deed proved alone by the word: j 

For my love — what De Lorge would not dare! 125 ^ 

With my scorn — what De Lorge could compare! ; 

And the endless descriptions of death i 

He would brave when my lip formed a breath, i 

I must reckon as braved, or, of course, j 

Doubt his word — and moreover, perforce, 130 



The Glove 67 

For such gifts as no lady could spurn, 

Must offer my love in return. 

When I looked on your Hon, it brought 

All the dangers at once to my thought, 

Encountered by all sorts of men, 135 

Before he was lodged in his den, — 

From the poor slave whose club or bare hands 

Dug the trap, set the snare on the sands, 

With no King and no Court to applaud. 

By no shame, should he shrink, overawed, 140 

Yet to capture the creature made shift, 

That his rude boys might laugh at the gift, 

— To the page who last leaped o'er the fence 

Of the pit, on no greater pretence 

Than to get back the bonnet he dropped, 145 

Lest his pay for a week should be stopped. 

So, wiser I judged it to make 

One trial what ^ death for my sake' 

Really meant, while the power was yet mine. 

Than to wait until time should define 150 

Such a phrase not so simply as I, 

Who took it to mean just Ho die.' 

The blow a glove gives is but weak: 

Does the mark yet discolor my cheek? 

But when the heart suffers a blow, 155 

Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?" 

I looked, as away she was sweeping. 

And saw a youth eagerly keeping 

As close as he dared to the doorway. 

No doubt that a noble should more weigh 160 

His Hfe than befits a plebeian; 

And yet, had our brute been Nemean — 



68 Muckle-Mouth Meg 

(I judge by a certain calm fervor 

The youth stepped with, forward to serve her) 

— He 'd have scarce thought you did him the worst turn 165 

If you whispered, '^ Friend, what you 'd get, first earn!" 

And when, shortly after, she carried 

Her shame from the Court, and they married. 

To that marriage some happiness, mauger 

The voice of the Court, I dared augur. 170 



MUCKLE-MOUTH MEG 

Frowned the Laird on the Lord: '^So, red-handed I catch 
thee? 

Death-doomed by our Law of the Border! 
We 've a gallows outside and a chiel to dispatch thee: 

Who trespasses — hangs: all 's in order.'' 

He met frown with smile, did the young EngUsh gallant: 5 
Then the Laird's dame: ''Nay, Husband, I beg! 

He 's comely: be merciful! Grace for the callant 
— If he marries our Muckle-mouth Meg!" 

''No mile- wide-mouthed monster of yours do I marry: 
Grant rather the gallows!" laughed he. 10 

"Foul fare kith and kin of you — why do you tarry?" 
"To tame your fierce temper!" quoth she. 

"Shove him quick in the Hole, shut him fast for a week: 
Cold, darkness and hunger work wonders: 

Who lion-like roars now, mouse-fashion will squeak, 15 
And 'it rains' soon succeed to 'it thunders.' " 



Muckle-Mouth Meg 69 

A week did he bide in the cold and the dark 

— Not hunger : for duly at morning 
In flitted a lass, and a voice like a lark 

Chirped ''Muckle-mouth Meg still ye 're scorning? 20 

"Go hang, but here 's parritch to hearten ye first!" 
"Did Meg's muckle-mouth boast within some 

Such music as yours, mine should match it or burst: 
No frog-jaws! So tell folk, my Winsome!" 

Soon week came to end, and, from Hole's door set wide, 25 
Out he marched, and there waited the lassie: 

"Yon gallows, or Muckle-mouth Meg for a bride! 
Consider! Sky 's blue and turf 's grassy: 

"Life 's sweet: shall I say ye wed Muckle-mouth Meg?" 
"Not I," quoth the stout heart: "too eerie 30 

The mouth that can swallow a bubblyjock's egg: 
Shall I let it munch mine? Never, Dearie!" 

"Not Muckle-mouth Meg? Wow, the obstinate man! 

Perhaps he would rather wed me!" 
"Ay, would he — ^with just for a dowry your can!" 35 

"I 'm Muckle-mouth Meg," chirruped she. 

"Then so — so — so — so — " as he kissed her apace — 

"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest 
From Margaret Minnikin-mou', by God's grace. 

To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest ! " 40 



70 My Last Duchess 



MY LAST DUCHESS 

FERRARA 

That 's my last Duchess painted on the wall, 

Looking as if she were alive. I call 

That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands 

Worked busily a day, and there she stands. 

Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said 5 

''Fra Pandolf " by design, for never read 

Strangers like you that pictured countenance. 

The depth and passion of its earnest glance. 

But to myself they turned (since none puts by 

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 10 

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst. 

How such a glance came there; so, not the first 

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not 

Her husband's presence only, called that spot 

Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps 15 

Fra Pandolf chanced to say ''Her mantle laps 

Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint 

Must never hope to reproduce the faint 

Half -flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff 

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 20 

For calHng up that spot of joy. She had 

A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad. 

Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er 

She looked on, and her looks w^ent everywhere. 

Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast, 25 

The dropping of the daylight in the West, 

The bough of cherries some officious fool 

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule 



My Last Duchess 71 

She rode with round the terrace — all and each 

Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 30 

Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but thanked 

Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked 

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name 

With anybody^s gift. Who 'd stoop to blame 

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill 35 

In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will 

Quite clear to such an one, and say, ^^ Just this 

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, 

Or there exceed the mark'^ — and if she let 

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set 40 

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, 

— E^en then w^ould be some stooping; and I choose 

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, 

Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without 

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; 45 

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands 

As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We '11 meet 

The company below, then. I repeat. 

The Count your master's known munificence 

Is ample warrant that no just pretence 50 

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed ; 

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed 

At starting, is my object. Nay, we '11 go 

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though. 

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 55 

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me ! 



72 The Flight of the Duchess 

THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS 

I 
You 're my friend: 

I was the man the Duke spoke to; 

I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too; 
So, here 's the tale from beginning to end. 
My friend! S 

II 
Ours is a great wild country: 

If you climb to our castle's top, 

I don't see where your eye can stop; 
For when you 've passed the corn-field country. 
Where vineyards leave oflf, flocks are packed, lo 

And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract. 
And cattle-tract to open-chase. 
And open-chase to the very base 
Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace, 
Round about, solemn and slow, 15 

One by one, row after row, 
Up and up the pine-trees go. 
So, like black priests up, and so 
Down the other side again 

To another greater, wilder country, 20 

That 's one vast red drear burnt-up plain. 
Branched through and through with many a vein 
Whence iron 's dug, and copper 's dealt; 

Look right, look left, look straight before, — 
Beneath they mine, above they smelt, 25 

Copper-ore and iron-ore, 
And forge and furnace mould and melt, 



The Flight of the Duchess 73 

And so on, more and ever more, 
Till at the last, for a bounding belt. 

Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore, 30 
— ^And the whole is our Duke's country. 

Ill 
I was born the day this present Duke was — 

I in the kennel, he in the bower: 

We are of like a^e to an hour. 

My father was huntsman in that day; 35 

Who has not hea rd my father say 

That, when a boi t was brought to bay. 

Three times, four times out of five, 

With his huntspe.ir he 'd contrive 

To get the killing-place transfixed, 40 

And pin him true, both eyes betwixt? 

And that 's why the old Duke would rather 

He lost a salt-pit than my father, 

And loved to have him ever in call; 

That 's why my father stood in the hall 45 

When the old Duke brought his infant out 

To show the people, and while they passed 
The wondrous bantling round about. 

Was first to start at the outside blast 
As the Kaiser's courier blew his horn, 50 

Just a month after the babe was born. 
^^And," quoth the Kaiser's courier, "since 
The Duke has got an heir, our Prince 

Needs the Duke's self at his side:" 
The Duke looked down and seemed to wince, 55 

But he thought of wars o'er the world wide, 
Castles a-fire, men on their march, 



74 The Flight of the Duchess 

The toppling tower, the crashing arch; 
And up he looked, and awhile he eyed 

The row of crests and shields and banners 60 

Of all achievements after all manners, 

And ^'ay," said the Duke with a surly pride. 
The more was his comfort when he died 

At next year's end, in a velvet suit, 

With a gilt glove on his hand, his foot 65 

In a silken shoe for a leather boot, 

Petticoated like a herald, 

In a chamber next to an ante-room. 

Where he breathed the breath of page and groom, 

What he called stink, and they, perfume: 70 

— They should have set him on red Berold 

Mad with pride, like fire to manage ! 

They should have got his cheek fresh tannage 

Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine ! 

IV 

So, at home, the sick tall yellow Duchess 75 

Was left with the infant in her clutches. 

And now was the time to revisit her tribe. 

And let our people rail and gibe 
At the empty hall and extinguished fire. 

As loud as we liked, but ever in vain, 80 

Till after long years we had our desire. 

And back came the Duke and his mother again. 

V 

And he came back the pertest little ape 
That ever affronted human shape; 



The Flight of the Duchess 75 

Full of his travel, struck at himself. 85 

You 'd say, he despised our bluff old ways? 
— Not he ! For in Paris they told the elf 

Our rough North land was the Land of Lays, 

The one good thing left in evil days; 
Since the Mid-Ages was the Heroic Time, 90 

And only in wild nooks like ours 
Could you taste of it yet as in its prime, 

And see true castles with proper towers. 
Young-hearted women, old-minded men, 
And manners now as manners were then. 95 

So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it, 
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; 
'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it. 
Nor for the pride's self, but the pride of our seeing it, 
He revived all usages thoroughly worn-out, 100 

The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out: 
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled 
On a lathy horse, all legs and length. 
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength; 
— They should have set him on red Berold 105 

With the red eye slow consuming in fire, 
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey-spire! 

VI 

Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard: 

And out of a convent, at the word. 

Came the lady, in time of spring. no 

— Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling! 

That day, I know, mth a dozen oaths 

I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes 

Fit for the chase of urochs or buffle 

In winter- time when you need to mufHe. 115 



76 The Flight of the Duchess 

But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure, 

And so we saw the lady arrive: 
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger! 

She was the smallest lady alive, 
Made in a piece of nature's madness, 120 

Too small, almost, for the life and gladness 

That over-filled her, as some hive 
Out of the bears' reach on the high trees 
Is crowded with its safe merry bees: 
In truth, she was not hard to please! 125 

Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead. 
Straight at the castle, that 's best indeed 
To look at from outside the walls: 
As for us, styled the ^^ serfs and thralls," 
She as much thanked me as if she had said it, 130 

(With her eyes, do you understand?) 
Because I patted her horse while I led it; 

And Max, who rode on her other hand, 
Said, no bird flew past but she inquired 
What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired — 135 

If that was an eagle she saw hover. 
And the green and gray bird on the field was the plover. 
When suddenly appeared the Duke: 

And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed 
On to my hand, — as with a rebuke, 140 

And as if his backbone were not jointed. 
The Duke stepped rather aside than forward. 

And welcomed her with his grandest smile; 

And, mind you, his mother all the while 
Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor'ward; 145 

And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies 
Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis; 
And, like a glad sky the north- wind sullies, 



The Flight of the Duchess 77 

The lady's face stopped its play, 

As if her first hair had grown gray; 150 

For such things must begin some one day. 

VII 

In a day or two she was well again; 

As who should say, ^' You labor in vain! 

This is all a jest against God, who meant 

I should ever be, as I am, content 155 

And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be/' 

So, smiling as at first wxnt she. 

VIII 

She was active, stirring, all fire — 

Could not rest, could not tire — 

To a stone she might have given Hfe! 160 

(I myself loved once, in my day) 
— For a shepherd's, miner's, huntsman's wife, 

(I had a wife, I know what I say) 
Never in all the world such an one! 
And here was plenty to be done, 165 

And she that could do it, great or small, 
She was to do nothing at all. 
There was already this man in his post. 

This in his station, and that in his office, 
And the Duke's plan admitted a wife, at most, 170 

To meet his eye, with the other trophies. 
Now outside the hall, now in it. 

To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen. 
At the proper place in the proper minute. 

And die aw^ay the life between. 175 

And it was amusing enough, each infraction 

Of rule — (but for after-sadness that came) 



78 The Flight of the Duchess 

To hear the consummate self-satisfaction 

With which the young Duke and the old dame 

Would let her advise, and criticise, i8o 

And, being a fool, instruct the wise. 

And, child-like, parcel out praise or blame: 

They bore it all in complacent guise. 

As though an artificer, after contriving 

A wheel- work image as if it were Hving, 185 

Should find wdth delight it could motion to strike him ! 

So found the Duke, and his mother like him: 

The lady hardly got a rebuff — 

That had not been contemptuous enough. 

With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause, 190 

And kept off the old mother-cat^s claws. 

IX 

So, the little lady grew^ silent and thin, 

Paling and ever paling. 
As the way is with a hid chagrin; 

And the Duke perceived that she was ailing, 195 

And said in his heart, '"T is done to spite me, 
But I shall find in my powxr to right me!" 



Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning, 
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning, 
A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice 200 

That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice. 
Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold. 

And another and another, and faster and faster, 
Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled: 

Then it so chanced that the Duke our master 205 



The Flight of the Duchess 79 

Asked himself what were the pleasures in season. 

And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty, 
He should do the Middle Age no treason 

In resolving on a hunting-party. 
Always provided, old books showed the way of it! 210 

What meant old poets by their strictures? 
And when old poets had said their say of it. 

How taught old painters in their pictures? 
We must revert to the proper channels, 
Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels, 215 

And gather up woodcraft's authentic traditions: 
Here was food for our various ambitions. 

So that the deer now, to make a short rhyme on 't, 
What with our Venerers, Prickers and Verderers, 
Might hope for real hunters at length and not murderers, 

And oh the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on 't! 221 

XI 

Now you must know that when the first dizziness 
Of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots subsided, 
The Duke put this question, ''The Duke's part pro- 
vided. 

Had not the Duchess some share in the business?" 225 

And, after much laying of heads together. 

Somebody's cap got a notable feather 

By the announcement with proper unction 

That he had discovered the lady's function; 

Since ancient authors gave this tenet, 230 

"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege, 
Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet, 

And with water to wash the hands of her liege 



8o The Flight of the Duchess 

In a clean ewer with a fair toweling, 

Let her preside at the disemboweling/' 235 

Yet when the Duke to his lady signified, 
Just a day before, as he judged most dignified. 
In what a pleasure she was to participate, — 

And, instead of leaping wide in flashes. 

Her eyes just lifted their long lashes, 240 

As if pressed by fatigue even he could not dissipate, 
And duly acknowledged the Duke's forethought. 
But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught, 
Of the weight by day and the watch by night, 
And much wrong now that used to be right, 245 

So, thanking him, decHned the hunting, — 
Was conduct ever more affronting? 
With all the ceremony settled — 

With the towel ready, and the sewer 

Polishing up his oldest ewer, 250 

And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald, 

Black-barred, cream-coated and pink eye-balled, — 
No wonder if the Duke was nettled! 
And when she persisted nevertheless, — 
Well, I suppose here 's the time to confess 255 

That there ran half round our lady's chamber 
A balcony none of the hardest to clamber; 
And that Jacynth the tire-woman, ready in waiting. 
Stayed in call outside, what need of relating? 
And since Jacynth was Hke a June rose, why, a fervent 
Adorer of Jacynth of course was your servant; 261 

And if she had the habit to peep through the casement, 

How could I keep at any vast distance? 

And so, as I say, on the lady's persistence. 
The Duke, dumb stricken with amazement, 265 



The Flight of the Duchess 8 1 

Stood for a while in a sultry smother, 

And then, with a smile that partook of the awful, 
Turned her over to his yellow mother 

To learn what was held decorous and lawful; 
And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct, 270 
As her cheek quick whitened thro' all its quince-tinct. 
Oh, but the lady heard the whole truth at once! 
What meant she? — Who was she? — Her duty and station. 
The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once. 
Its decent regard and its fitting relation. 275 

Well, somehow or other it ended at last. 
And, licking her whiskers, out she passed; 
And after her, — making (he hoped) a face 

Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin, 
Stalked the Duke's self with the austere grace 280 

Of ancient hero or modern paladin. 
From door to staircase — oh, such a solemn 
Unbending of the vertebral column! 

XII 

However, at sunrise our company mustered; 

And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel, 285 

And there 'neath his bonnet the pricker blustered, 

With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel; 
For the court-yard walls were filled with fog 
You might have cut as an ax chops a log — 
Like so much wool for color and bulkiness; 290 

And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness. 
Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily. 

And lo, as he looked around uneasily. 

The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder 



82 The Flight of the Duchess 

This way and that. from the valley under; 295 

And, looking through the court-yard arch, 

Down in the valley, what should meet him 
But a troop of Gipsies on their march? 

No doubt with the annual gifts to greet him. 



XIII 



And up they wound till they reached the ditch, 300 
Whereat all stopped save one, a witch 
That I knew, as she hobbled from the group. 

By her gait directly and her stoop, 
I, whom Jacynth was used to importune 
To let that same witch tell us our fortune. 305 

The oldest Gipsy then above ground; 
And, sure as the autumn season came round, 
She paid us a visit for profit or pastime. 
And every time, as she swore, for the last time. 
And presently she was seen to sidle 310 

Up to the Duke till she touched his bridle, 
So that the horse of a sudden reared up 
As under its nose the old witch peered up 
With her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes 

Of no use now but to gather brine, 3x5 

And began a kind of level whine 
Such as they used to sing to their viols 
When their ditties they go grinding 
Up and down with nobody minding: 
And then, as of old, at the end of the humming 320 
Her usual presents were forthcoming 
— ^A dog- whistle blowing the fiercest of trebles, 
(Just a sea-shore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles,) 
Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end, — 



The*Flight of the Duchess 83 

And so she awaited her annual stipend. 325 

But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe 

A word in reply; and in vain she felt 

With twitching fingers at her belt 

For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt, 
Ready to put what he gave in her pouch safe, — 330 

Till, either to quicken his apprehension. 
Or possibly with an after-intention. 
She was come, she said, to pay her duty 
To the new Duchess, the youthful beauty. 
No sooner had she named his lady, 335 

Than a shine lit up the face so shady. 
And its smirk returned with a novel meaning — 
For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning; 
If one gave her a taste of what life was and sorrow. 
She, fooUsh to-day, would be wiser to-morrow; 340 

And who so fit a teacher of trouble 
As this sordid crone bent well-nigh double? 
So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture. 

He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture. 

The life of the lady so flower-hke and delicate 345 

With the loathsome squalor of this helicat. 

I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned 

From out of the throng, and while I drew near 
He told the crone — as I since have reckoned 

By the way he bent and spoke into her ear 350 

With circumspection and mystery — 
The main of the lady's history. 
Her frowardness and ingratitude: 
And for all the crone's submissive attitude 
I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening, 
And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening, 356 



84 The Flight of the Duchess 

As though she engaged with hearty goodwill 

Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil, 
And promised the lady a thorough frightening. 
And so, just giving her a gUmpse 360 

Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps 
The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw, 

He bade me take the Gipsy mother 

And set her telling some story or other 
Of hill or dale, oak-w^ood or fernshaw, 365 

To wile away a weary hour 
For the lady left alone in her bower. 
Whose mind and body craved exertion 
And yet shrank from all better diversion. 

XIV 

Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter, 370 

Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo 
Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor, 

And back I turned and bade the crone follow. 
And what makes me confident what 's to be told you 

Had all along been of this crone's devising, 375 

Is, that, on looking round sharply, behold you, 

There was a novelty quick as surprising: 
For first, she had shot up a full head in stature. 

And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered, 
As if age had foregone its usurpature, 380 

And the ignoble mien was wholly altered. 
And the face looked quite of another nature. 
And the change reached too, whatever the change meant, 
Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement: 
For where its tatters hung loose like sedges, 385 

Gold coins were glittering on the edges; 
And under her brow, like a snail's horns newly 



The Flight of the Duchess 85 

Come out as after the rain he paces, 
Two unmistakable eye-points duly 

Live and aware looked out of their places. 390 

So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry 
Of the lady's chamber standing sentry; 
I told the command and produced my companion, 
And Jacynth rejoiced to admit any one, 
For since last night, by the same token, 395 

Not a single word had the lady spoken: 
They went in both to the presence together. 
While I in the balcony watched the weather. 

XV 

And now, what took place at the very first of all, 

I cannot tell, as I never could learn it: 400 

Jacynth constantly wished a curse to fall 

On that little head of hers and burn it 

If she knew how she came to drop so soundly 

Asleep of a sudden, and there continue 
The whole time sleeping as profoundly 405 

As one of the boars my father would pin you 
'Twixt the eyes where life holds garrison, 
— Jacynth, forgive me the comparison! 
But where I begin my own narration 
Is a Httle after I took my station 410 

To breathe the fresh air from the balcony. 
And, having in those days a falcon eye. 
To follow the hunt thro' the open country. 

From where the bushes thinlier crested 
The hillocks, to a plain where 's not one tree. 415 

When, in a moment, my ear was arrested 
By — was it singing, or was it saying. 
Or a strange musical instrument playing 



86 The Flight of the Duchess 

In the chamber? — and to be certain 

I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain, 420 

And there lay Jacynth asleep. 

Yet as if a watch she tried to keep, 

In a rosy sleep along the floor 

With her head against the door; 

While in the midst, on the seat of state, 425 

Was a queen^ — the Gipsy woman late. 

With head and face downbent 

On the lady's head and face intent: 

For, coiled at her feet like a child at ease, 

The lady sat between her knees, 430 

And o'er them the lady's clasped hands met. 

And on those hands her chin was set, 

And her upturned face met the face of the crone 

Wherein the eyes had grown and grown 

As if she could double and quadruple 435 

At pleasure the play of either pupil. 

I said, ^Ts it blessing, is it banning?" 

But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue. 
At once I was stopped by the lady's expression: 

For it was life her eyes were drinking 440 

From the crone's wide pair above unwinking, 

— ^Life's pure fire, received without shrinking, 

Into the heart and breast whose heaving 

Told you no single drop they were leaving, 

— ^Life, that filHng her, passed redundant 445 

Into her very hair, back swerving 

Over each shoulder, loose and abundant. 

As her head thrown back showed the white throat curving; 

And the very tresses shared in the pleasure, 



The Flight of the Duchess 87 

Moving to the mystic measure, 450 

Bounding as the bosom bounded. 

I stopped short, more and more confounded, 

As still her cheeks burned and eyes glistened. 

As she listened and she listened: 

When all at once a hand detained me, 455 

The selfsame contagion gained me. 

And I kept time to the wondrous chime, 

Making out words and prose and rhyme. 

Till it seemed that the music furled 

Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped 460 
From under the words it first had propped, 

And left them midway in the world: 

Word took word as hand takes hand, 

I could hear at last, and understand. 

And when I held the unbroken thread, 465 

The Gipsy said: — 

'^And so at last we find my tribe. 

And so I set thee in the midst. 
And to one and all of them describe 

What thou saidst and what thou didst, 470 

Our long and terrible journey through, 
And all thou art ready to say and do 
In the trials that remain: 
I trace them the vein and the other vein 
That meet on thy brow and part again, 475 

Making our rapid mystic mark; 

And I bid my people prove and probe 

Each eye's profound and glorious globe 
Till they detect the kindred spark 
In those depths so dear and dark; 480 



88 The Flight of the Duchess 

For so I prove thee, to one and all, 
Fit, when my people ope their breast, 

To see the sign, and hear the call. 
And take the vow, and stand the test 
Which adds one more child to the rest — 485 

When the breast is bare and the arms are wide. 

And the world is left outside. 

For there is probation to decree. 

And many and long must the trials be 

Thou shalt victoriously endure, 490 

If that brow is true and those eyes are sure. 

So, trial after trial past, 

Wilt thou fall at the very last 

Breathless, half in trance 

With the thrill of the great deliverance, 495 

Into our arms for evermore; 

And thou shalt know, those arms once curled 

About thee, what we knew before. 
How love is the only good in the world. 
Henceforth be loved as heart can love, 500 

Or brain devise, or hand approve! 
Stand up, look below, 
It is our life at thy feet we throw 
To step with into light and joy; 
Not a power of life but we employ 505 

To satisfy thy nature's want. 

I foresee and could foretell 

Thy future portion, sure and well: 

But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, 

Let them say what thou shalt do! 510 

Only be sure thy daily Ufe, 



The Flight of the Duchess 89 

In its peace or in its strife, 
Never shall be unobserved; 

We pursue thy whole career, 

And hope for it, or doubt, or fear, — 515 

Lo, hast thou kept thy path or swerved. 
We are beside thee in all thy ways. 
With our blame, with our praise. 
Our shame to feel, our pride to show, 
Glad, angry — ^but indifferent, no! 520 

So, at the last shall come old age. 

Decrepit as befits that stage; 

How else wouldst thou retire apart 

With the hoarded memories of thy heart, 

And gather all to the very least 525 

Of the fragments of life's earher feast. 

Let fall through eagerness to find 

The crowning dainties yet behind? 

Ponder on the entire past 

Laid together thus at last, 530 

When the twilight helps to fuse 

The first fresh wdth the faded hues. 

And the outline of the whole. 

As round eve's shades their framework roU^ 

Grandly fronts for once thy soul. 535 

And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam 

Of yet another morning breaks, 
And like the hand which ends a dream, 
Death, with the might of his sunbeam. 

Touches the flesh and the soul awakes, 540 

Then—" 

Ay, then indeed something would happen! 

But what? For here her voice changed like a bird's; 



go The Flight of the Duchess 

There grew more of the music and less of the words; 

Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen 

To paper and put you down every syllable 545 

With those clever clerkly fingers, 
All I Ve forgotten as well as what lingers 

In this old brain of mine that 's but ill able 

To give you even this poor version — 

Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, 550 

The peace most deep and the charm completest. 
There came, shall I say, a snap — 

And the charm vanished ! 

And my sense returned, so strangely banished, 
And, starting as from a nap, 555 

I knew the crone was bewitching my lady. 
With Jacynth asleep ; and but one spring made I 
Down from the casement, round to the portal, — 

Another minute and I had entered, — 
When the door opened, and more than mortal 560 

Stood, with a face where to my mind centered 
All beauties I ever saw or shall see. 
The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy. 
She was so different, happy and beautiful, 

I felt at once that all was best, 565 

And that I had nothing to do, for the rest, 
But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful. 
Not that, in fact, there was any commanding; 

I saw the glory of her eye, 
And the brow's height and the breast's expanding, 570 

And I was hers to live or to die. 
As for finding what she wanted, 
You know God Almighty granted 
Such little signs should serve wild creatures 



The Flight of the Duchess 91 

To tell one another all their desires, 575 

So that each knows what his friend requires, 
And does its bidding without teachers. 
I preceded her; the crone 
Followed silent and alone; 

I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered 580 

In the old style; both her eyes had slunk 
Back to their pits; her stature shrunk; 
In short, the soul in its body sunk 
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard. 
We descended, I preceding; 585 

Crossed the court with nobody heeding; 
All the world was at the chase. 
The court-yard like a desert-place. 
The stable emptied of its small fry; 
I saddled myself the very palfrey 590 

I remember patting while it carried her, 
The day she arrived and the Duke married her. 
And, do you know, though it 's easy deceiving 
Oneself in such matters, I can't help believing 
The lady had not forgotten it either, 595 

And knew the poor devil so much beneath her 
Would have been only too glad, for her service. 
To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise. 
But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it. 
Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it: 600 
For though the moment I began setting 
His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting, 
(Not that I meant to be obtrusive) 
She stopped me, while his rug was shifting. 
By a single rapid finger's lifting, 605 

And, with a gesture kind but conclusive. 
And a little shake of the head, refused me, — 



92 The Flight of the Duchess 

I say, although she never used me, 
Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind her, 
And I ventured to remind her, 6io 

I suppose with a voice of less steadiness 

Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me, 
— Something to the effect that I was in readiness 

Whenever God should please she needed me, — 
Then, do you know, her face looked down on me 615 
With a look that placed a crown on me. 
And she felt in her bosom, — mark, her bosom — 
And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom. 
Dropped me . . . ah, had it been a purse 
Of silver, my friend, or gold that 's worse, 620 

Why, you see, as soon as I found myself 

So understood, — that a true heart so may gain 

Such a reward, — I should have gone home again, 
Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself! 
It was a little plait of hair 625 

Such as friends in a convent make 

To wear, each for the other's sake, — 
This, see, which at my breast I wear. 
Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment). 
And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment. 630 

And then, — and then, — to cut short, — this is idle, 

These are feelings it is not good to foster, — 
I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle. 

And the palfrey bounded, — and so we lost her. 

XVI 

When the liquor 's out why clink the cannikin? 635 
I did think to describe you the panic in 
The redoubtable breast of our master the mannikin, 
And what was the pitch of his mother's yellowness. 



The Flight of the Duchess 93 

When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness 
— But it seems such child's play, 640 

What they said and did with the lady away! 

Nay, to my mind, the world's face looked so stern 
As that sweet form disappeared through the postern, 
She that kept it in constant good humor, 
It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do 
more. 645 

But the world thought otherwise and went on, 
And my head 's one that its spite was spent on: 
Thirty years are fled since that morning. 
And with them all my head's adorning. 
Nor did the old Duchess die outright, 650 

As you expect, of suppressed spite: 



But she and her son agreed, I take it, 
That no one should touch on the story to wake it, 
For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery. 
So, they made no search and small inquiry — 655 

And when fresh Gipsies have paid us a visit, I 've 
Noticed the couple were never inquisitive. 
But told them they 're folks the Duke don't want here. 
And bade them make haste and cross the frontier. 
Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it. 
And the old one was in the young one's stead, 661 

And took, in her place, the household's head. 
And a blessed time the household had of it! 



XVII 

You 're my friend — 

What a thing friendship is, world without end! 665 



94 I'he Flight ol the Duchess 

I have seen my Uttle lady once more, 

Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it. 

For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; 
I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: 

I '11 tell you what I intend to do: 670 

I must see this fellow^ his sad life through — 

He is our Duke, after all. 

And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall. 

My father was born here, and I inherit 

His fame, a chain he bound his son with; 675 

Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it. 

But there 's no mine to blow up and get done with: 
So, I must stay till the end of the chapter. 
For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter. 
Be it a thing to be glad on or sorry on, 680 

Some day or other, his head in a morion 
And breast in a hauberk, his heels he '11 kick up. 
Slain by an onslaught fierce of hiccup. 
And then, when red doth the sword of our Duke rust, 
And its leathern sheath lie o'ergrown with a blue crust. 
Then I shall scrape together my earnings; 686 

For, you see, in the churchyard Jacynth reposes, 

And our children all went the way of the roses: 
It 's a long lane that knows no turnings. 
One needs but little .tackle to travel in ; 690 

So, just one stout cloak shall I indue: 
And for a staff, what beats the javehn 

With which his boars my father pinned you? 
And then, for a purpose you shall hear presently, 

Taking some Cotnar, a tight plump skinful, 695 

I shall go journeying, w^ho but I, pleasantly! 

Sorrow is vain and despondency sinful. 



The Flight of the Duchess 95 

What 's a man's age? He must hurry more, that 's 
all; 
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold: 
When we mind labor, then only, we 're too old — 700 



And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees, 

I hope to get safely out of the turmoil 
And arrive one day at the land of the Gipsies, 
And find my lady, or hear the last news of her 
From some old thief and son of Lucifer, 705 

His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, 
Sunburned all over like an ^thiop. 
And when my Cotnar begins to operate 
And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, 
And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, 710 
I shall drop in with — as if by accident — 
'^You never knew then, how it all ended, 
What fortune good or bad attended 
The little lady your Queen befriended?" 
— And when that 's told me, what 's remaining? 715 

This world 's too hard for my explaining. 
The same wdse judge of matters equine 
Who still preferred some slim four-year-old 
To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold, 
And, for strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine, 720 
He also must be such a lady's scorner! 
Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau: 
Now up, now down, the world's one see-saw. 
— So, I shall find out some snug corner 
Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight, 725 

Turn myself round and bid the world good night; 



96 The Guardian-Angel 

And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing 
Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen) 

To a world where will be no further throwing 

Pearls before swine that can't value them. Amen! 730 



THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL 

A PICTURE AT FANO 



Dear and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave 
That child, when thou has done with him, for me! 

Let me sit all the day here, that when eve 
Shall find performed thy special ministry. 

And time come for departure, thou, suspending 5 

Thy flight, mayst see another child for tending, 
Another still to quiet and retrieve. 

II 
Then I shall feel thee step one step, no more. 

From where thou standest now, to where 1 gaze. 
— And suddenly my head is covered o'er 10 

With those wings, white above the child w^ho prays 
Now on that tomb — and I shall feel thee guarding 
Me, out of all the world; for me, discarding 

Yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door. 

Ill 

I would not look up thither past thy head 15 

Because the door opes, like that child, I know. 

For I should have thy gracious face instead, 
Thou bird of God ! And wilt thou bend me low 



At the "Mermaid" 97 

Like him, and lay, Hke his, my hands together, 
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether 20 

Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread? 

IV 

If this was ever granted, I would rest 

My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands 

Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast. 
Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, 25 

Back to its proper size again, and smoothing 

Distortion down till every nerve had soothing. 
And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed. 



How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired! 

I think how I should view the earth and skies 30 

And sea, when once again my brow was bared 

After thy healing, with such different eyes. 
O world, as God has made it! All is beauty: 
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty. 

What further may be sought for or declared? 35 



AT THE ''MERMAID'' 

The figure that thou here seest . . . Tut! 
Was it for gentle Shakespeare put? 

B. JoNSON. (Adapted.) 

I 

I — "next Poet?" No, my hearties, 

I nor am nor fain would be ! 
Choose your chiefs and pick your parties, 

Not one soul revolt to me! 



98 At the "Mermaid" 

I, forsooth, sow song-sedition? 5 

I, a schism in verse provoke? 
I, blown up by bard's ambition, 

Burst — ^your bubble-king? You joke. 

II 

Come, be grave! The sherris mantling 

Still about each mouth, mayhap, 10 

Breeds you insight — just a scantling — 

Brings me truth out — just a scrap. 
Look and tell me! Written, spoken. 

Here 's my life-long work: and where 
— Where 's your warrant or my token 15 

I 'm the dead king's son and heir? 

Ill 
Here 's my work: does work discover — 

What was rest from work — my life? 
Did I live man's hater, lover? 

Leave the world at peace, at strife? 20 

Call earth ugHness or beauty? 

See things there in large or small? 
Use to pay its Lord my duty? 

Use to own a lord at all? 

IV 

Blank of such a record, truly 25 

Here 's the work I hand, this scroll. 
Yours to take or leave; as duly, 

Mine remains the unproffered soul. 
So much, no whit more, my debtors — 

How should one like me lay claim 30 

To that largess elders, betters 

Sell you cheap their souls for — fame? 



At the "Mermaid" 99 

V 

Which of you did I enable 

Once to sHp inside my breast, 
There to catalogue and label 35 

What I like least, what love best, 
Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, 

Seek and shun, respect — deride? 
Who has right to make a rout of 

Rarities he found inside? 40 

VI 

Rarities or, as he 'd rather, 

Rubbish such as stocks his own: 
Need and greed (O strange) the Father 

Fashioned not for him alone! 
Whence — the comfort set a-strutting, 45 

Whence — the outcry ''Haste, behold! 
Bard's breast open wide, past shutting, 

Shows what brass we took for gold!" 

VII 

Friends, I doubt not he 'd display you 

Brass — myself call orichalc, — 50 

Furnish much amusement; pray you 

Therefore, be content I balk 
Him and you, and bar my portal! 

Here 's my work outside: opine 
What 's inside me mean and mortal! 55 

Take your pleasure, leave me mine! 

VIII 

Which is — not to buy your laurel 

As last king did, nothing loth. 
Tale adorned and pointed moral 

Gained him praise and pity both, 60 



ICXD At the ''Mermaid" 

Out rushed sighs and groans by dozens, 
Forth by scores oaths, curses flew: 

Proving you were cater-cousins. 
Kith and kindred, king and you! 

IX 

Whereas do I ne'er so Httle 65 

(Thanks to sherris) leave ajar 
Bosom's gate — no jot nor tittle 

Grow we nearer than we are. 
Sinning, sorrowing, despairing, 

Body-ruined, spirit-wrecked, — 70 

Should I give my woes an airing, — 

Where 's one plague that claims respect? 

X 

Have you found your life distasteful? 

My life did, and does, smack sweet. 
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? 75 

Mine I saved and hold complete. 
Do your joys with age diminish? 

When mine fail me, I '11 complain. 
Must in death your daylight finish? 

My sun sets to rise again. 80 

XI 

What, like you, he proved— your Pilgrim — 

This our world a wilderness. 
Earth still gray and heaven still grim. 

Not a hand there his might press. 
Not a heart his own might throb to, 85 

Men all rogues and women — say, 
Dolls which boys' heads duck and bob to. 

Grown folk drop or throw away? 



At the ''Mermaid" loi 

XII 

My experience being other, 

How should I contribute verse 90 

Worthy of your king and brother? 

Balaam-hke I bless, not curse. 
I find earth not gray but rosy, 

Heaven not grim but fair of hue. 
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. 95 

Do I stand and stare? All 's blue. 

XIII 

Doubtless I am pushed and shoved by 

Rogues and fools enough: the more 
Good luck mine, I love, am loved by 

Some few honest to the core. 100 

Scan the near high, scout the far low! 

^^But the low come close:" what then? 
Simpletons? My match is Marlowe; 

Sciolists? My mate is Ben. 

XIV 

Womankind — ''the cat-like nature, 105 

False and fickle, vain and weak" — 
What of this sad nomenclature 

Suits my tongue, if I must speak? 
Does the sex invite, repulse so, 

Tempt, betray, by fits and starts? no 

So becalm but to convulse so, 

Decking heads and breaking hearts? 

XV 

Therefore, since no leg to stand on 

Thus I 'm left with, — joy or grief 
Be the issue, — I abandon 115 

Hope or care you name me Chief! 



I02 The Boy and the Angel 

Chief and king and Lord's anointed, 

I? — who never once have wished 
Death before the day appointed: 

Lived and Hked, not poohed and pished! 120 

XVI 

Back then to our sherris-brewage! 

^^ Kingship" quotha? I shall wait — 
Waive the present time: some new age . . . 

But let fools anticipate! 
Mea^nwhile greet me — ^^ friend, good fellow, 125 

Gentle Will,'' my merry men! 
As for making Envy yellow 

With ^'Next Poet "—(Manners, Ben!) 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 

Morning, evening, noon and night, 
^Traise God!" sang Theocrite. 

Then to his poor trade he turned, 
Whereby the daily meal was earned. 

Hard he labored, long and well ; 5 

O'er his work the boy's curls felL 

But ever, at each period. 

He stopped and sang, '^Praise God!" 

Then back again his curls he threw, 

And cheerful turned to work anew. 10 



The Boy and the Angel 103 

Said Blaise, the listening monk, ^' Well done; 
I doubt not thou art heard, my son: 

^^ As well as if thy voice to-day 
Were praising God, the Pope^s great way. 

^^This Easter Day, the Pope at Rome 15 

Praises God from Peter's dome/' 

Said Theocrite, '^ Would God that I 

Might praise Him, that great way, and die!" 

Night passed, day shone, 

And Theocrite was gone. 20 

With God a day endures alway, 
A thousand years are but a day. 

God said in heaven, *^Nor day nor night 
Now brings the voice of my delight." 

Then Gabriel, like a rainbow's birth, 25 

Spread his wings and sank to earth; 

Entered, in flesh, the empty cell. 

Lived there, and played the craftsman well; 

And morning, evening, noon and night, 

Praised God in place of Theocrite. 30 

And from a boy, to youth he grew: 
The man put off the stripling's hue: 



I04 The Boy and the Angel 

The man matured and fell away 
Into the season of decay : 

And ever o^er the trade he bent, 35 

And ever lived on earth content. 

(He did God's will; to him, all one 
If on the earth or in the sun.) 

God said, ^'A praise is in mine ear; 

There is no doubt in it, no fear: 40 

"So sing old worlds, and so 
New worlds that from my footstool go. 

'Clearer loves sound other ways: 
I miss my little human praise. '' 

Then forth sprang Gabriel's wings, off fell 45 
The flesh disguise, remained the cell. 

'Twas Easter Day: he flew to Rome, 
And paused above Saint Peter's dome. 

In the tiring-room close by 

The great outer gallery, 50 

With his holy vestments dight, 
Stood the new Pope, Theocrite: 

And all his past career 
Came back upon him clear, 



The Boy and the Angel 105 

Since when, a boy, he pKed his trade, 55 

Till on his hfe the sickness weighed; 

And in his cell, when death drew near, 
An angel in a dream brought cheer: 

And rising from the sickness drear. 

He grew^ a priest, and now stood here. 60 

To the East with praise he turned. 
And on his sight the angel burned. 

"I bore thee from thy craftsman's cell, 
And set thee here; I did not well. 

'^Vainly I left my angel-sphere, 65 

Vain was thy dream of many a year. 

^^Thy voice's praise seemed weak; it dropped — 
Creation's chorus stopped! 

^^Go back and praise again 
The early way, while I remain. 70 

^^With that weak voice of our disdain. 
Take up creation's pausing strain. 

^^Back to the cell and poor employ: 
Resume the craftsman and the boy!" 

Theocrite grew old at home; 75 

A new Pope dwelt in Peter's dome. 



io6 Amphibian 

One vanished as the other died: 
They sought God side by side. 



AMPHIBIAN 



The fancy I had to-day, 

Fancy which turned a fear! 
I swam far out in the bay, 

Since waves laughed warm and clear. 

II 

I lay and looked at the sun, 5 

The noon-sun looked at me: 
Between us two, no one 

Live creature, that I could see. 

Ill 
Yes! There came floating by 

Me, who lay floating too, 10 

Such a strange butterfly! 

Creature as dear as new: 

IV 

Because the membraned wings 

So wonderful, so wide. 
So sun-suffused, were things 15 

Like soul and naught beside. 

V 

A handbreadth over head! 

All of the sea my own. 
It owned the sky instead; 

Both of us were alone. 20 



Amphibian 107 

VI 

I never shall join its flight, 

For, naught buoys flesh in air. 
If it touch the sea — good night! 

Death sure and swift waits there. 

VII 

Can the insect feel the better 25 

For watching the uncouth play 
Of Umbs that slip the fetter, 

Pretend as they were not clay? 

vin 

Undoubtedly I rejoice 

That the air comports so well 30 

With a creature which had the choice 

Of the land once. Who can tell? 

IX 

What if a certain soul 

Which early sHpped its sheath, 
And has for its home the whole 35 

Of heaven, thus look beneath, 

X 

Thus watch one who, in the world, 

Both lives and likes Hfe's way, 
Nor wishes the wings unfurled 

That sleep in the worm, they say? 40 

XI 

But sometimes when the weather 

Is blue, and warm waves tempt 
To free oneself of tether, 

And try a life exempt 



io8 Amphibian 

XII 

From wordly noise and dust, 45 

In the sphere which overbrims 
With passion and thought, — why, just 

Unable to fly, one swims! 

XIII 

By passion and thought upborne, 

One smiles to oneself — ''They fare 50 

Scarce better, they need not scorn 

Our sea, who live in the air!" 

XIV 

Emancipate thro' passion 

And thought, with sea for sky. 
We substitute, in a fashion, 55 

For heaven — ^poetry: 

XV 

Which sea, to all intent. 

Gives flesh such noon-disport 
As a finer element 

Affords the spirit-sort. 60 

XVI 

Whatever they are, we seem: 

Imagine the thing they know; 
All deeds they do, we dream; 

Can heaven be else but so? 

XVII 

And meantime, yonder streak 65 

Meets the horizon's verge; 
That is the land, to seek 

If we tire or dread the surge: 



Among the Rocks 109 

XVIII 

Land the sohd and safe — 

To welcome again (confess!) 70 

When, high and dry, we chafe 

The body, and don the dress. 

XIX 

Does she look, pity, wonder 

At one who mimics flight, 
Swims — heaven above, sea under, 75 

Yet always earth in sight? 



AMONG THE ROCKS 



Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth. 
This autumn morning! How he sets his bones 

To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet 

For the ripple to run over in its mirth; 

Listening the while, where on the heap of stones 5 

The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. 

II 
That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true; 

Such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows. 
If you loved only what were worth your love. 
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you: 10 

Make the low nature better by your throes! 
Give earth yourself, go up for gain above! 



no Rabbi Ben Ezra 



SONG FROM ''PIPPA PASSES 

The year 's at the spring, 
And day 's at the morn; 
' Morning 's at seven; 

The hill-side 's dew-pearled; 
The lark 's on the wing; 
The snail 's on the thorn; 
God 's in His heaven — 
All 's right with the world! 



RABBI BEN EZRA 

I 

'^ Grow old along with me ! 

i The best is yet to be, 

^ The last of life, for which the first was made: 

h Our times are in His hand 

i Who saith ^^A whole I planned, 5 

/ Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be 

'^ afraid! '^ 

II 

Not that, amassing flowers. 

Youth sighed ^' Which rose make ours. 
Which lily leave and then as best recall!" 

Not that, admiring stars, 10 

It yearned ^^Nor Jove, nor Mars; 
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them 
all!" 



Rabbi Ben Ezra iii 

III 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulhng youth's brief years, 
Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! 15 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without, 
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

IV 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

Were man but formed to feed 20 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: 

Such feasting ended, then 

As sure an end to men; 
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw- 
crammed beast? 



V 

-5 



Rejoice we are allied ^ ^ 



To That which doth provide _ 

And not partake, effect and not receive! 7 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

Nearer we hold of God 
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 30 

VI 

Then, welcome each rebuif 

That turns earth's smoothness rough. 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 35 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 



112 Rabbi Ben Ezra 

VII 

For thence, — a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks, — 
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 

What I aspired to be, 40 

And was not, comforts me: 
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

VIII 

What is he but a brute 

Whose flesh has soul to suit, 
Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 45 

To man, propose this test — 

Thy body at its best, 
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? 

IX 

Yet gifts should prove their use: 

I own the Past profuse 50 

Of power each side, perfection every turn : 

Eyes, ears took in their dole. 

Brain treasured up the whole; 
Shoxild not the heart beat once '^How good to live and 
learn?'' 

X 

Not once beat ^'Praise be Thine! 55 

I see the whole design, 
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man ! 
Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thou shalt do!'' 



Rabbi Ben Ezra 113 

XI 

For pleasant is this flesh; 61 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 65 

Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did best! 

XII 

Let us not always say 

^^ Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" 

As the bird wings and sings, 70 

Let us cry ^'AU good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul!'' 

XIII 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage. 
Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 75 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 
From the developed brute; a god tho' in the germ. 

XIV 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 80 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed. 

When I wage battle next. 
What weapons to select, what armor to indue. 



114 Rabbi Ben Ezra 

XV 

Youth ended, I shall try 85 

My gain or loss thereby; 
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weigh the same. 

Give life its praise or blame : 
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 90 

XVI 

For, note when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 
The deed off, calls the glory from the gray: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots — ^^Add this to the rest, 95 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

XVII 

So, still within this life, 

Tho' lifted o'er its strife, 
Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

'^This rage was right i' the main, 100 

That acquiescence vain: 
The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." 

XVIII 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 
To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: 105 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 



Rabbi Ben Ezra 115 

XIX 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, thro' acts uncouth, no 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made: 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife should know, than tempt 
Further. Thou w^aitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! 

XX 

Enough now, if the Right 115 

And Good and Infinite 
Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 
From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 120 

XXI 

Be there, for once and all. 

Severed great minds from small, 
Announced to each his station in the Past! 

Was I, the world arraigned. 

Were they, my soul disdained, 125 

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at 
last! 

XXII 

Now, who shall arbitrate? 

Ten men love what I hate. 
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 130 

Match me: we all surmise. 
They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul believe? 



ii6 Rabbi Ben Ezra 

xxin 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called ^^work," must sentence pass, 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 135 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

XXIV 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 140 

So passed in making up the main account: 

All instincts immature. 

All purposes unsure. 
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount: 

XXV 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 145 

. Into a narrow act. 
Fancies that broke thro' language and escaped : 

All I could never be. 

All, men ignored in me. 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

XXVI 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 151 

That metaphor! and feel 
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 

Thou, to whom fools propound. 

When the wine makes its round, 155 

'^ Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" 



Rabbi Ben Ezra 117 

XXVII 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 160 

That was, is, and shall be: 
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

XXVIII 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance. 
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 165 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent, 
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

XXIX 

What tho' the earlier grooves 

Which ran the laughing loves 170 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim. 

Skull-things in order grim 
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

XXX 

Look not thou down but up! 175 

To uses of a cup. 
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal. 

The new wine's foaming flow. 

The Master's lips a-glow! 
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with 
earth's wheel? 180 



ii8 Saul 

XXXI 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who mouldest men ; 
And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I, — to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colors rife, 185 

Bound dizzily, — mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 

XXXII 

So, take and use Thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk. 
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! 

My times be in Thy hand! 190 

Perfect the cup as planned ! 
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 

SAUL 

I 

Said Abner, ^'At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou 

speak. 
Kiss my cheek, wish me well! " Then I wished it, and did 

kiss his cheek. 
And he, ^' Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance 

sent, 
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent 
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet, 
Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be 

wet. 6 

For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, 
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of 

praise, 



Saul 119 

To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife, 

And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back 

upon life. 10 

II 

^^ Yet now my heart leaps, beloved ! God's child with his 

dew 
On thy gracious gold hair, and those Hlies still living and 

blue 
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild 

heat 
Were now raging to torture the desert!" 

m 

Then I, as was meet. 
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet, 
And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was un- 

looped; 16 

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped; 
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered 

and gone, 
That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on 
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I 

prayed, 20 

And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not 

afraid 
But spoke, ^^Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice 

replied. 
At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I de- 
scried 
A something more black than the blackness — the vast, the 

upright 
Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight 



I20 Saul 

Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. 26 
Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent-roof, showed Saul. 

IV 

He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched 

out wide 
On the great cross-support in the center, that goes to each 

side; 
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his 

pangs 30 

And waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs, 
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come 
With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul, drear and stark, 

blind and dumb. 

V 

Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies we twine round 
its chords 

Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide — those sun- 
beams like swords! 35 

And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after 
one. 

So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. 

They are white and untorn bv the bushes, for lo, they have 
fed 

Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's 
bed; 

And now one after one seeks it lodging, as star follows star 

Into eve and the blue far above us, — so blue and so far! 41 

VI 

— Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland will each 

leave his mate 
To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate 



Saul 121 

Till for boldness they fight one another: and then, what has 

weight 
To set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house — 
There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half 

mouse ! 46 

God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our 

fear, 
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family 

here. 

VII 

Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, 

when hand 
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great 

hearts expand 50 

And grow one in the sense of this world's life. — And then, 

the last song 
When the dead man is praised on his journey — ^'Bear, bear 

him along 
With his few faults shut up hke dead flowerets! Are balm- 
seeds not here 
To console us? The land has none left such as he on the 

bier. 
^^Oh, would w^e might keep thee, my brother!'' — And then, 

the glad chaunt 55 

Of the marriage, — first go the young maidens, next, she 

whom we vaunt 
As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling. — ^And then, the 

great march 
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an 

arch 
Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? — 

Then, the chorus intoned 



122 Saul 

As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 60 
But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul groaned. 

VIII 

And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened 
apart; 

And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered : and spar- 
kles 'gan dart 

From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a 
start. 

All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at 
heart. 65 

So the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there 
erect. 

And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked, 

As I sang, — 

IX 

^' Oh, our manhood's prime vigor ! No spirit feels waste. 

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to 
rock, 70 

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool sil- 
ver shock 

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 

And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 
divine. 

And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 
of wine, 75 

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes 
tell 

That the water was wont to go warbhng so softly and well. 



Saul 123 

How good is man's Kfe, the mere living! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! 
Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword 

thou didst guard 80 

When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious re- 
ward? 
Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as 

men sung 
The low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint 

tongue 
Joining in while it could to the witness, ^Let one more at- 
test, 
I have lived, seen God's hand thro' a lifetime, and all was 

for best!' 85 

Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, not 

much, but the rest. 
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working 

whence grew 
Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit 

strained true: 
And the friends of thy boyhood — that boyhood of wonder 

and hope. 
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's 

scope, — 90 

Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; 
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head 

combine ! 
On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage 

(Kke the throe 
That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold go) 
High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning 

them, — all 95 

Brought to blaze on the head of one creature — King Saul! " 



124 Saul 

X 

And lo, with that leap of my spirit, — heart, hand, harp and 

voice, 
Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice 
SauPs fame in the light it was made for — as when, dare I 

say. 
The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains thro' its ar- 
ray, ICO 
And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot — " Saul! " cried I, and 

stopped. 
And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, who 

hung propped 
By the tent's cross-support in the center, was struck by his 

name. 
Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy summons goes right to 

the aim, 
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held 

(he alone, 105 

While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad 

bust of stone 
A year's snow bound about for a breastplate, — leaves grasp 

of the sheet? 
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his 

feet, 
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your 

mountain of old, 
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages un- 
told — no 
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow 

and scar 
Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest — all hail, 

there they are! 



Saul 125 

— Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest 
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on 

his crest 
For their food in the ardors of summer. One long shudder 

thrilled 115 

All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was 

stilled 
At the King's self left standing before me, released and aware. 
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse, 'twixt 

hope and despair. 
Death was past, life not come: so he waited. Awhile his 

right hand 
Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to 

remand 120 

To their place what new objects should enter: 'twas Saul 

as before, 
I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any 

more 
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the 

shore, 
At their sad level gaze o'er the ocean — a sun's slow decline 
Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and en- 
twine 125 
Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, arm 

folded arm 
O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. 

XI 

What spell or what charm, 
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should 

I urge 
To sustain him where song had restored him? Song filled 

to the verge 



126 Saul 

His cup with the wine of this Hfe, pressing all that it yields 
Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on 

what fields, 131 

Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the 

eye 
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup 

they put by? 
He saith, ^'It is good; '^ still he drinks not: he lets me praise 

life. 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 

XII 

Then fancies grew rife 135 
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me 

the sheep 
Fed in silence — above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in 

sleep ; 
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might 

lie 
'Neath his ken, tho' I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and 

the sky: 
And I laughed — '^ Since my days are ordained to be passed 

with my flocks, 140 

Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the 

rocks. 
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the 

show 
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall 

know! 
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage 

that gains, 
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for.'' And 

now these old trains 145 



Saul 127 

Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more 

the string 
Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus — 

XIII 

^^Yea, my King," 
I began — ^'thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that 

spring 
From the mere mortal life held in common by man and by 

brute : 
In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears 

fruit. 150 

Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, — how its stem 

trembled first 
Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely out- 
burst 
The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these 

too, in turn 
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more 

was to learn, 
E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates 

shall we slight, 155 

When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for 

the plight 
Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not 

so! stem and branch 
Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm- 
wine shall staunch 
Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such 

wine. 
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine! 
By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt 

enjoy 161 



128 Saul 

More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a 

boy. 
Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed 

thou hast done 
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the 

sun 
Looking down on the earth, tho' clouds spoil him, tho' tem- 
pests efface, 165 
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must every- 
where trace 
The results of his past summer-prime, — so, each ray of thy 

will, 
Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall 

thrill 
Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too 

give forth 
A like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and 

the North 170 

With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in 

the past! 
But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last: 
As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height. 
So with man — so his power and his beauty forever take 

flight. 
No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth 

o'er the years! 175 

Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with 

the seer's! 
Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb — 

bid arise 
A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built 

to the skies, 



Saul 129 

Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose 

fame would ye know? 
Up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall 

go 180 

In great characters cut by the scribe, — Such was Saul, so 

he did; 
With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid, — 
For not half, they'll aflSrm, is comprised there! Which 

fault to amend, 
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they 

shall spend 
(See, in tablets 't is level before them) their praise, and 

record 185 

With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, — the statesman's 

great word 
Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river 's 

a-wave 
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet- 
winds rave: 
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their 

part 
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that 

thou art!" 190 

XIV 

And behold while I sang . . . but Thou who didst grant 

me that day. 
And before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay, 
Carry on and complete an adventure, — my shield and my 

sw^ord 
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was 

my word, — 



130 Saul 

Still be with me, who then at the summit of human en- 
deavor 195 

And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hope- 
less as ever 

On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, mighty to 
save. 

Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance — God's 
throne from man's grave! 

Let me tell out my tale to its ending — my voice to my heart 

Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I 
took part, 200 

As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my 
sheep. 

And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep ! 

For I wake in the gray dewy covert, while Hebron up- 
heaves 

The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kid- 
ron retrieves 

Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. 

XV 

I say then, — my song 

While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more 

strong 206 

Made a proffer of good to console him — he slowly resumed 

His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right-hand 

replumed 
His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the 

swathes 
Of his turban, and see — the huge sweat that his counte- 
nance bathes, 210 
He wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as of 
yore, 



Saul 131 

And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set 

before. 
He is Saul, ye remember in glory, — ere error had bent 
The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, tho' 

much spent 
Be the Hfe and the bearing that front you, the same, God 

did choose, 215 

To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite 

lose. 
So sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by the pile 
Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there 

awhile, 
And sat out my singing, — one arm round the tent-prop, to 

raise 
His bent head, and the other hung slack — till I touched on 

the praise 220 

I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient there; 
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then first I was 

'ware 
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast 

knees 
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak- 
roots which please 
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up to know 
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but 

slow 226 

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care 
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' 

my hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, 

with kind power — 
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. 



132 Saul 

Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized 

mine — 231 

And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the 

sign? 
I yearned — ^Xould I help thee, my father, inventing a 

bliss, 
I would add, to that hf e of the past, both the future and this ; 
I would give thee new Ufe altogether, as good, ages hence, 
As this moment, — had love but the warrant, love's heart to 

dispense!" 236 

XVI 

Then the truth came upon me. No harp more — no song 
more! outbroke — 

XVII 

"I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I 

spoke : 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my 

brain 
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork — returned 

him again 240 

His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw: 
I report, as man may of God's work — all 's love, yet all 's 

law\ 
Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty 

tasked 
To perceive him has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was 

asked. 
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid 

bare. 245 

Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the In- 
finite Care! 



Saul 133 

Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? 

I but open my eyes, — and perfection, no more and no 

less, 
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the 
clod. 250 

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it 

too) 
The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-com- 
plete, 
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet. 254 
Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, 
I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. 
There 's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, 
I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think) 
Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst 
E'en the Giver in one gift. — Behold, I could love if I durst! 
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may overtake 
God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's 
sake. 262 

— What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors 

great and small, 
Nine-and-ninety flew ope to our touch, should the hun- 
dredth appal? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest 
of all? 265 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift. 
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the 

parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what 
Began? 



134 Saul 

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this 

man, 
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone 

can? 270 

Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much 

less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a 

soul, 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the 

whole? 
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest) 
These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, 

the best? 276 

Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the 

height 
This perfection, — succeed with Hfe's dayspring, death's 

minute of night? 
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, ^ 
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid him 

awake 280 

From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself 

set 
Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new harmony 

yet 
To be run, and continued, and ended — who knows? — or 

endure ! 
The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make 

sure; 
By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss. 
And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles 

in this. 286 



Saul 135 

XVIII 

"I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who re- 
ceive: 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. 
All 's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to 

my prayer 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the 

air. 290 

From thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread 

Sabaoth: 
/ will? — the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth 
To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare 
Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my 

despair? 
This; — 't is not what man Does which exalts him, but what 

man Would do ! 295 

See the King — I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall 

through. 
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to en- 
rich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — knowing 

w^hich, 
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak thro' me 

now! 
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — so 

wilt thou! 300 

So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 

crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath, 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death! 304 



136 Saul 

As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! 
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 

the most weak. 
'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that 

I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me. 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this 

hand 311 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 

Christ stand!'' 

XIX 

I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. 

There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to 
right, 

Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the 
aware: 315 

I repressed, I got thro' them as hardly, as strugglingly there, 

As a runner beset by the populace famished for news — 

Life or death. The v/hole earth was awakened, hell loosed 
with her crews; 

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and 
shot 

Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted 
not, 320 

For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, sup- 
pressed 

All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy be- 
hest. 

Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to 
rest. 



Prospice 137 

Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from 
earth — 

Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender 
birth; ^ ^ 325 

In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the 
hills; 

In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind- 
thrills; 

In the startled wild, beasts that bore off, each with eye si- 
dling still 

Tho' averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and 
chill 

That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with 
awe: 330 

E'en the serpent that slid away silent, — he felt the new 
law. 

The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the 
flowers; 

The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the 
vine-bowers: 

And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and 
low. 

With their obstinate, all but hushed voices — ^^E'en so, it is 
so!'' 335 

PROSPICE 

Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat. 

The mist in my face. 
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 

I am nearing the place. 
The power of the night, the press of the storm, 5 

The post of the foe; 



138 Epilogue to ''Asolando" 

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, 

Yet the strong man must go : 
For the journey is done and the summit attained, 

And the barriers fall, 10 

Tho' a battle 's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 

The reward of it all. 
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more. 

The best and the last! 
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, 

And bade me creep past. 16 

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 

The heroes of old. 
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 

Of pain, darkness and cold. 20 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 

The black minute 's at end, 
And the elements' rage, the fiend- voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 25 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again. 

And with God be the rest! 



EPILOGUE TO ''ASOLANDO'' 

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, 

When you set your fancies free. 
Will they pass to where — ^by death, fools think, impris- 
oned — 
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, 
— Pity me? 5 



Epilogue to "Asolando" 139 

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken ! 

What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel 

— Being — who? 10 

One who never turned his back but marched breast for- 
ward, 
Never doubted clouds would break. 
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would 

triumph. 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 

Sleep to wake. 15 

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
^'Strive and thrive!" cry ^' Speed, — fight on, fare ever 

There as here!'' 20 



NOTES AND COMMENT 

(Heavy numerals refer to lines of the poems) 

How They Brought the Good News (Page 3) 

"There is no sort of historical foundation about Good News from 
Ghent, ^^ declared Browning. "I wrote it under the bulwark of a 
vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to 
appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good 
horse York, then in my stable at home." This and several similar 
statements by Browning show that the poem is not the ballad of 
the good news which saved Ghent, but a lyric expressive of Brown- 
ing's own joy in the motion of his horse. In the tedium of the voyage 
his yearning for the exhilaration of a gallop spent itself through his 
art in the imaginary gallop with Roland, "my horse without peer." 
The horse is the hero of the poem and we thrill with the sense of his 
grand endeavor. The knowledge of the geography of those ninety 
miles can add little to the poem. Browning said: "I wrote the poem 
in pencil on the inside cover of Bartoli's Simboli, nearly the only 
book I had with me. This must account for and excuse the impossible 
distances (even for York) between place and place. I fancied that 
Ghent was invested, in extremity, and able at last to receive news 
of succor by some unsuspected line of road." The date, "16 — ," 
suggests that the poet gives his horse-hero an historical setting during 
the struggle of the Netherlands for hberation from the tyranny of 
Spain, but a knowledge of this history can contribute little to the 
appreciation of the lyric fervor of the poem. Browning has put into 
these lines all his love of a horse. This reappears elsewhere in his 
works, in his Muleykeh, in the old huntsman's love of horses in the 
Flight of the Duchess, and in the words of Luria, the Moorish soldier, 
laughing 

When his horse drops the forage from his teeth, 
And neighs to hear him hum his Moorish songs. 

141 



142 Notes and Comment 

Contrast with this Longfellow's Paul Revere, James Buchanan Reed's 
Sheridan^s Ride, and the stag hunt in the first canto of The Lady of 
the Lake. Scott's love of horses manifests itself repeatedly in his 
novels. 
Miss Barrett's comment is worth quoting (Nov. 15, 1845): 

''Then The Ride with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to 
prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was 
driven through all that suiBFering — yes, and how that one touch of 
softness acts back upon the energy and resolution and exalts both, 
instead of weakening anything, as might have been expected by the 
vulgar of writers or critics." 

One day Browning addressed a fair young lady as she returned 
with her companions from a ride. *' And did you gallop? " he asked. 
She replied, ''I galloped, Joyce galloped, we galloped all three." 
Browning joined the laughter at the witty repartee, and beating 
the time of the galloping horses' feet on the table with his fingers, he 
repeated the exact measure in Latin from Vergil. "Why not borrow 
from Vergil as I did?" he asked. "He is as rich as one of your gold 
mines, while I am but a poor scribe." 



Cavalier Tunes (Page 6) 

These present dramatically the spirit and character of the royalists 
who during the English Civil War defended the rights of King Charles. 
The CavaUers were largely drawn from the landed gentry and the 
nobles, and were well born and well bred, courtly and loyal to the 
King personally, despising and defying the people's leaders and the 
people's cause. Browning studied this period of history while assist- 
ing John Forster to complete his Life of Strajfford, and then wrote his 
own drama of Strajfford. The Tunes were a mere by-product of the 
larger work, thrown off rapidly to express the poet's conception of 
the fiery political passion of the defenders of Charles, just £is an his- 
torian who was writing the epic or drama of our Civil War might, 
throw off incidentally short stories or sketches. 

The first is the rallying song to the King's standard at Nottingham 



Notes and Comment 143 

in 1642; a regiment of ^* great-hearted gentlemen" under Sir Byng, 
are "marching along, fifty score strong," exalting the King, scorning 
the "crop-headed Parhament," and cursing those "pestilent carles," 
the leaders of the people. 

The second is a drinking song, a health to King Charles, when the 
tide of war has already turned against the King. It is led by a griz- 
zled old royalist, whose goods and gold, the gift of the King, are 
spent, flung away, and whose boy George cheered and laughed "while 
Noll's damned troopers shot him." Yet his loyalty is unabated 
and he shouts a hoarse defiance against the King's foes. 

Boot and Saddle, originally entitled My Wife Gertrude, is an early 
morning call "To saddle," stirring the bivouac of a small troop of 
mounted Cavaliers in the closing months of the war. The leader 
has just received news that his wife Gertrude in Brancepeth Castle, 
forty miles away, is surrounded by the "Roundheads' array"; he 
feels confident that she "laughs when you talk of surrendering," 
so he rallies his troop to the rescue. 

The style of these songs is rough and strong in accord with the up- 
roarious, daredevil spirit of the singers. The first is in a four- 
accented dactylic line, imitative of the rhythm of the cantering of 
the regiment of horse. Boot and Saddle is in the same meter adapted 
to the quicker rhythm of a gallop, the movement being set by the 
initial staccato words of command to mount, which should be read 
with due intervals to keep this rhythm. Give a Rouse is in three 
accented anapestic hues with double rime; and gets its character 
from the roar of the rouse, which strikes full strength on the name of 
Charles. 



7, 13, and 14. Pym— Hampden— Hazelrig—Fiennes— young 
Harry. John Pym, John Hampden, Sir Arthur Hazelrig, Na- 
thaniel Fiennes, and Sir Henry Vane, Jr., were leaders of the 
parliamentary party against the King and his cause. 

15. Rupert: Prince Robert of Bavaria, commonly known as 
Prince Rupert, a nephew of the King. He was a gallant but 
reckless leader of the King's cavalry. 



144 Notes and Comment 



II 



i6. Noll: the nickname of Cromwell, the master spirit of the 
opposition to the King. His troopers, the Ironsides, made him 
famous as a soldier. 



Ill 



ID. Castle Brancepeth: in the County of Durham. 

10. Roundheads: the nickname given to the King's foes, be- 
cause of their close-cropped hair. Compare the '' crop-headed 
Parliament," line 2 of the previous poem. 

Why I am a Liberal (Page 9) 

This sonnet was prefixed in 1886 to an essay of the same title by 
Mr. Andrew Reid, It was never included by Browning in his col- 
lected works, and is his only personal expression on public affairs. 

The Lost Leader (Page 9) 

This poem is a far earher expression of Browning's poHtical faith, 
though he hides his own identity behind the shghtly dramatic mask. 
An ardent liberal is expressing his regret for the political defection 
from the cause of liberty of the lost leader, who had sold out for a 
''handful of silver," or a "riband to stick in his coat." Browning 
had referred to such defection in his Strafford and in the traitor 
Charles of the Italian in England. But readers immediately began 
identifying Wordsworth or Southey as the leader in the poet's mind. 
When pressed on this point the poet said: "I can only answer with 
something of shame and contrition that I undoubtedly did have 
Wordsworth in my mind — but simply as a model; you know an artist 
takes one or two striking traits in the features of his model and uses 
them to start his fancy on a flight, which may end far enough from 
the good man or woman v/ho happens to be sitting for nose and eye. 
I thought of the great poet's abandonment of liberalism at an un- 
lucky juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. 
But once caU my fancy portrait Wordsworth — and how much more 



Notes and Comment 145 

one ought to say." That is, Browning is thinking of political apostasy 
from noble ideals, the abandoning of pure, generous political faith 
for sordid gain, a failure which repeats itself in all lands and all ages, 
and Browning prefers to leave the portrait undesignated in time and 
place. Was he artistically right in doing so? 

"Of the new poems," writes Miss Barrett, "I like supremely . . . 
that Lost Leader — which strikes so broadly and so deep — which no- 
body can ever forget — and which is Worth all the journalizing and 
pamphleteering in the world." What does Miss Barrett mean by the 
last statement? 

The Patriot (Page 11) 

This "old story" shows us the patriot statesman passing to his 
death as a poHtical martyr at the Shambles Gate. He is the very 
antithesis of the Lost Leader. Browning is concerned in showing 
the very heart of the man in his martyrdom, and he is supposed not 
so much to be speaking to some one, as merely to be thinking. "A 
year ago this very day," he had been the idol of the people, but his 
year of faithful service had ended in disaster. He is on his way to 
doom. "They fling, whoever has a mind, stones at me for my year's 
misdeeds." Yet he is neither angry, nor bitter, nor cynical, nor 
afraid; for in the consciousness of his own rectitude he can trust that 
**"God shall repay: I am safer so." 

How does Browning convince the reader that he is showing a 
patriot martyr, rather than a traitor going to a just doom? Would 
the patriot's story be more effective from the lips of an outsider? — or 
if the historic account of his pubHc service and of his betrayal were 
made plain to us? 

Incident of the French Camp (Page 12) 

The poet here records an incident in Napoleon's campaign of 1809, 
in Bavaria, the gallantry of the deed having arrested his attention 
here as it did in Herve Riel, without regard to any narrow national 
prejudices. It is significant to the poet not merely for the gallant 
pride of the boy who "with breast all but shot in two," bears the 



146 Notes and Comment 

word of victory to his general, but for the glimpse of Napoleon in 
the passion of his martial ambition and glory, as ''his plans soared 
up again like fire," yet checking all this with the finer and rarer touch 
of human pity for the wounded boy before him. The actual messenger 
at Ratisbon was a man, not a boy. What did Browning gain artistic- 
ally by this modification of fact? Does the incident gain anything 
from the person of the narrator? 

The Italian in England (Page 14) 

Browning here records his impression of the Italian political exile 
who had fought unsuccessfully for the Hberation of Italy from Aus- 
trian tyranny. Like the Finn and the Pole to-day, the Italian of 
1840 was devoted to "the dear lost land" with a passionate ardor. 
These patriots finally freed Italy in 1861. Mazzini may have been 
the patriot who sat for this picture, and it is said he was greatly 
pleased with the poem. Browning, like most English Liberals, sym- 
pathized with the struggle of Italy for freedom, and he employs his 
art to picture this high-minded patriot who tells to an English friend 
the story of his escape after the disastrous failure, probably of 1824, 

That second time they hunted me. 
From hill to plain, from shore to sea. 

Yet Browning is not telling a story of thrilling adventure, he is think- 
ing of the passion of the man for Italy, his hatred which would 

grasp Metternich until 
I felt his red wet throat distil 
In blood through these two hands; 

the scorn for his brothers who, lost to the cause, live in Austria^s pay, 

and his faith in 

that woman's face, 
Its calm simplicity of grace. 
Our Italy's own attitude. 

The lost cause is never utterly lost while such men live. 

Would it have been better to have made the time and place of 
the escape of the Italian, and the historic circumstance of the de- 
feated insurrection more plain to the reader? What does the portrait 



Notes and Comment 147 

of the peasant woman add to the poem and to the character of the 
narrator? Why does the artist prefer to use the revolutionary spirit 
softened by the flight of time rather than in the heat of conflict? 

8, II, 20, 116, and 125. Charles. This probably refers to 
Carlo Alberto, a Prince of the house of Savoy, who for a time 
espoused the cause of liberation for Italy, but later became a lost 
leader. 

19 and 121. Mettemich. This famous Austrian minister and 
diplomatist was a cruel foe to the liberators. 

76. Tenebrae: a part of the liturgical service for Holy Week. 

Herve'Riel (Page 19) 

During his vacation rambles in Brittany, Browning came upon 
the story of Herv6 Riel, the Breton pilot who had saved the remnant 
of the French fleet, under command of Admiral Damfreville, fugitives 
after the crushing defeat off Cape La Hogue, May 19, 1692, by pilot- 
ing them safely out of reach of the English, through the shallows of 
the river Ranee, till they lay safely under the guns of the fortress 
of SoUdor at St. Malo. The gallant act caught Browning's fancy 
all the more because it was the act of a mere common sailor, whose 
fame had soon been lost. He wrote his ballad as a tribute and me- 
morial. It was published in the Cornhill Magazine, March, 1871, and 
Browning sent the £100 received for it to the Paris ReUef Fund, to 
provide for the suffering in Paris after the Siege. It was significant 
that Browning spoke this word of tribute to a French hero in the hour 
of France's bitterest defeat, at the close of the Franco-Prussian War. 
Browning recites this story of French heroic patriotism, and the 
Greek patriotism of Pheidippides, but never celebrates an EngUsh 
hero or victory, as did Tennyson in The Fleet, The Revenge, The De- 
fense ofLucknow, and the Charge of the Light Brigade. 

Several years after the publication of this poem. Browning's atten- 
tion was called to the fact that the historic Herve Riel had demanded 
not a day's furlough, but "unconditional discharge, that he might 
rejoin his wife, whom he called La Belle AuroreJ" He replied — ''You 
are undoubtedly right ... an absolute discharge seems to approach 



148 Notes and Comment 

in importance a substantial reward. Still — truth above all things." 
Why does Browning imply preference for the unsuhstantial reward 
given in the poem? What is the significance of his "truth above all 
things"? What is Browning's conception of the character of Herve 
Riel? Do you see any good reason for the fact that Browning here 
abandons the dramatic monologue and presents the incident in direct 
narrative? Could Herve Riel have told the incident effectively? 
Could Damfreville have done so? What is the nature and purpose 
of stanza xi? 

18. Twelve and eighty: a literal translation of the French 
idiom, quatre-vingt-douze. 

44. Croisickese: dweller in the little town of Croisic in Brit- 
tany. 

46. Malouins: dwellers in Saint Malo, at the mouth of the 
Ranee. 

49, 61, 86. Greve: the perilous sands at the river's mouth. 

Pheidippides (Page 25) 

This poem gives Browning's artistic realization of an historic 
incident connected with the battle of Marathon (490 b. c. ) in which 
he feels, and by his art makes the reader feel, the patriotic ardor 
which won the battle and saved Greece and Europe from Persia. 
Herodotus, writing half a century after the battle, says: "And first, 
before they left Athens^ the generals sent off to Sparta a herald, one 
Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and by profession and 
practice a runner. This man, according to the account which he 
gave the Athenians on his return, when he was near Mount Parthe- 
nium above Tegea, fell in with the god Pan, who called him by his 
name, and bade him ask the Athenians, * wherefore they neglected 
him so entirely, when he was kindly disposed towards them, and 
had often helped them in times past, and would do so again in time 
to come?* The Athenians believing entirely in the truth of this re- 
port, as soon as their affairs were once more in good order, set up a 
temple to Pan under the Acropolis. On the occasion of which we 
speak . . . Pheidippides reached Sparta on the very next day after 



Notes and Comment 149 

quitting the city of Athens. Upon his arrival, he went before the 
rulers, and said to them: 'Men of Lacadaemon, the Athenians beseech 
you to hasten to their aid, and not allow that state, which is the most 
ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians. Eretria, 
look you, is already carried away captive, and Greece weakened by 
the loss of no mean city.' . . . The Spartans wished to help the 
Athenians, but were unable to give them any present succor, as they 
did not like to break their established law. It was the ninth day of 
the first decade, and they could not march out of Sparta on the ninth, 
when the moon had not reached the full. So they waited for the full 
of the moon." 

Browning has used his art of monologue writing to make real to 
the reader the scene in Sparta and the interview between Pan and 
Pheidippides. He imagines Pheidippides addressing the archons, 
rulers of Athens, telling them on his return of what he had seen. The 
man is all afire with the patriotism of the hour, and with splendid 
heroism stands for the Greece which a few days later won Marathon. 

The latter part of the poem. Hues 89-1 20, is supposed to be spoken 
by another narrator, Miltiades, telling the glorious end of Pheidippides, 
which was recorded by Lucian: ''The first to use this phrase {Rejoice, 
we conquer) is said to have been Pheidippides, when on one day he 
ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the news of the victory 
to the magistrates who were sitting in great anxiety about the out- 
come of the battle. 'Rejoice, we conquer!' Having said this, he 
fell dead in the very act of delivering his message, and expired with 
the word 'Rejoice' on his lips." 

Think then of the spent runner, after his one hundred and forty 
mile run to save Athens, greeting the Gods and the sacred memories 
of Athens, addressing her rulers, and waving the bit of fennel as 
pledge of Pan's promised aid. His words glow with passion — the 
zeal which declared "over the hills, under the dales, down pits and 
up peaks, did I burn," which tells of his appeal to Sparta, while 
"every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust, and malice," 
of the fierce indignation that spurred him on through the long return 
to Athens, of the heart astorm with conflicting passions until "there, 
in the cool of the cleft," he met the god Pan. And what is the return 



150 Notes and Comment 

due for such ardor, Browning questions. Here, as in Hervi Ridy 
and in the little plait of hair given by the Duchess to her servitor, 
Browning rejects ** substantial reward.'* With a touch of romanti- 
cism, which is not at all Greek, Browning suggests ^Ho marry a certain 
maid, hie me to house and home." But after all, Pheidippides' final 
reward was to utter those greatest of all words to Athens in her hour 
of crisis, Rejoice, we conquer. 

What is the effect of having the story told by Pheidippides himself 
instead of by Miltiades or some Greek poet (compare Peter Ronsard 
in The Glove), or by some common onlooker? Does the poet concern 
himself with the surrounding Athenian crowd? Why is this Marathon 
race to death interpreted as the due reward of Pheidippides? Com- 
pare Browning's version of another Marathon story in Ecethlos. 

1-8. This stanza is an invocation to the river Ilyssus flowing under 
the walls of Athens, to the Acropolis, her citadel, to the gods Jupiter, 
Minerva, and Diana, and finally to Pan. Prof. J. W. Cunliffe writes : 
''All this is entirely accurate from the archaeological point of view, and 
it is artistically effective, because it gives us the Athenian atmosphere 
at the outset. But once this first impression is made, Browning pays 
no more attention to history, geography, or archaeology." 

2. Daemons: in the Greek sense of attendant spirits. 

9. Archons: the rulers of Athens, with the badge of the tettixj 
or golden grasshopper, a symbol of noble birth. 

18. Slaves* tribute, water and earth. These symbols of sub- 
mission were commonly demanded by Asiatic despots from their 
tributaries. 

19. Eretria: one of the chief cities on the island of Euboea. 
It lay in the path of the Persian army and had already been de- 
stroyed. 

20. 72. Hellas: Greece. 

31. Athene: Pallas Athen6, the patron goddess of Athens, for 
whom the city was named. 

32. Phoibos: Phoebus Apollo, the god of the sun. 

32. Artemis: Diana, the goddess of the chase. 

33. Olumpos: Olympus. The poet uses the Greek spelling 
for the name of this mount of the gods. 



Notes and Comment 151 

47. filleted victim: the garlanded animal for sacrifice. 

47. fulsome libation: the drink offering of wine poured out 
to the gods. 

49. Oak and olive and bay. Garlands of oak, olive, and bay- 
were regarded as the due enwreathing of the brows of Zeus, 
Pallas Athene, and Phoebus Apollo, respectively. 

52, 57, 86. Fames. Browning changes the scene from Mount 
Parthenium to Mount Parnes, in northern Attica, quite out of 
the course of the return journey from Sparta. Professor Cunliffe 
suggests that the poet prefers a mountain in Attica as truer to 
the patriotic spirit of the anecdote. 

62. Erebos: the unknown darkness beneath the world. 

69. Goat-thighs. Pan is represented as having the nether 
limbs of a goat. Compare ^' The Goat-God," line 77, and ** goat- 
thigh,'' line 80. 

.81. This, foreshowing the place: the famous battle-field of 
Marathon was so named from the abundance of fennel (Greek 
marathon) which grew there; hence the fennel field, line 109. 

87. The razor's edge: an adaptation of the common Greek 
figure for a precarious condition. 

89. Miltiades : the archon who a few days later led the Athe- 
nians to victory 

106. To Akropolis: that is, back to Athens. 

Home Thoughts from Abroad (Page 31) 

This poem, written during the poet's trip to Italy in 1844, expresses 
his love of the natural beauty of England. From youth he had de- 
lighted in nature, spending long days in field and wood, and becoming 
intimately acquainted with her. There was some homesickness in 
the longing 

Oh, to be in England 

Now that April 's there. 

The thickets in "tiny leaf," the "chafi&nch in the orchard," and the 
"wise thrush" are with him in fancy, and he contrasts the butter- 
cups with the "gaudy melon-flower" which flaunts before his eye. 



15^ Notes and Comment 

As in the Ride front Ghent , the poet gratifies a yearning by a fancied 
joy through his art.. Miss Barrett wrote to Browning: "Your spring 
song is full of beauty, as you know very well — and ' that 's the wise 
thrush,' so characteristic of you (and of the thrush too) that I was 
sorely tempted to ask you to write it 'twice over.' " 

Home Thoughts from the Sea (Page 32) 

These hnes were written during the poet's voyage to Italy in 1838, 
as the ship was passing the four memorials of England's greatness 
by sea — St. Vincent and Trafalgar where Nelson had won undying 
fame, Cadiz where Elizabethan sea-dogs had bearded the Spaniard, 
and Gibraltar, the fortress which stands as the monument of the 
stabihty of England's power. Browning's heart thrilled at the thought 
of all the memories associated with them till he asked "how can I 
help England?" This is almost the sole utterance in poetry of 
Browning's patriotism, while Tennyson was continually chanting 
British glory. Miss Barrett speaks of "those grand sea-sights in 
long lines." 

Up at a Villa (Page 32) 

This is Browning's humorous fancy of the man who is drawn city- 
ward, fascinated by city excitement, the mania of our modern world, 
but is checked in turn by the prohibitive cost of living, a world old 
human problem repeating itself in all lands and all ages. Browning 
may have realized this personally during the earlier Casa Guidi 
residence, as he was poor enough to feel the pinch of high city prices. 
Though he chose an "Italian man of quality" to voice this bit of 
human nature, Browning shared with him this delight in the rush and 
turmoil and excitement of the city, and was always a city dweller. 
What does the poem gain by its Italian setting? 

4. By Bacchus: an adaptation of the common Italian oath 
corpo di Bacco. 

39. Diligence: the mail-coach. 

42. Pulcinello: the Punch and Judy show. 

56. Tax upon salt, etc.: the city tariffs on imports, unknown 
in America, but still practiced in many European cities. 



Notes and Comment 153 

Confessions (Page 37) 

These lines are a whimsical answer to the grave question of the 
reverend sir: ''Do I view the world as a vale of tears?" Browning 
always rejected this cant of denying the good of the world. 

Have you found your life distasteful? 
My life did, and does, smack sweet 

is his assertion in At the Mermaid. And again he makes Fra Lippo 

Lippi say: 

This world 's no blot for us, 
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 

Instead of treating the question seriously here, he applies his art in 
the grotesque to laugh it away. The speaker is dying, but has not 
lost his quaint sense of humor. To the questions of his ghostly con- 
fessor, he gives the essence of his own life in the memory of a sweet 
but stolen romance of long years ago, which now mingles itself with 
the medicine bottles and the meager furnishings of the room. His 
"poor mind's out of tune," but he stands again "by the rose- 
wreathed gate," and can only exclaim 

How sad and bad and mad it was — 
But then, how it was sweet! 

A Face (Page 38) 

These Hnes, giving the effect of a beautiful girl's face on the fancy 
of Browning, were inscribed by the poet in the autograph album of 
Emily Augusta Patmore, Oct. 11, 1852. He seems to try to reproduce 
in words the art effects of those portraits, 

Painted upon a background of pale gold, 
Such as the Tuscan's early art prefers ! 

Evelyn Hope (Page 39) 

Evelyn Hope and Love Among the Ruins represent a considerable 
number of dramatic love poems in Browning's work, which differ 



154 Notes and Comment 

from the usual t)^es of personal and romantic love poetry. His 
poems are not personal utterances of love; for as Browning declares 
in One Word More and At the Mermaid ^ he was little inclined to give 
the world his *^joys and sorrows, hopes and . . . disbelievings." 
Nor are they romantic stories of passion such as had delighted the 
readers of Scott and Byron; nor romantic idylls like Tennyson's 
Mille/s Daughter and Gardener^ s Daughter. They are studies of love 
in its various phases and effects within the soul, and Browning was 
bent on revealing the way love, as a spark from heaven, ennobled 
the soul which was true to it, or brought ruin to the one who betrayed 
it for inferior joys or ambitions. For his purposes the failures or 
disappointments of love were quite as significant as its successes. 
Browning never threw around the passion of love that unreal romantic 
halo so common to love literature, but treated it with almost severe 
realism as he scrutinized how the soul received this spark of heavenly 
light. 

Evelyn Hope is one of these studies. Love may be thwarted in many 
ways, — by false ambition, by selfishness, as he reveals elsewhere. 
Here it is thwarted by death. Evelyn Hope in her charm of girlhood 
has awakened love in the heart of this middle-aged scholarly lover, 
though she has been quite unconscious of it. If success in love means 
nothing save in the acknowledged return of love, then this lover has 
failed. But Browning in several poems shows his belief that love 
has won if it is true from but one side. Browning felt that even the 
intervention of death could not ruin love. Hence he seats the lover 
of Evelyn Hope quietly by the side of the dead girl, thinking of all 
the charm of her youth, thinking of the fullness and power of his own 
life as he had 

Gained me the gains of various men, 
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; 

Thinking too of the 

one thing in my soul's full scope, 
Either I missed, or itself missed me, 

until he can rise at last to the faith that their love will yet be realized. 



Notes and Comment 155 

I claim you still for my own love's sake. 

Much is to learn, much to forget 
Ere the time be come for taking you. 

Why should Browning use this thoughtful middle-aged man rather 
than a Romeo to utter the truth of this poem? How does Browning 
succeed in impressing us with the charm of person and character in 
the dead girl? Would the poem gain in effect if we knew more of the 
earlier life of the girl and her lover, and of their touch with one an- 
other? 

Love Among the Ruins (Page 41) 

In this poem Browning neither tells a story nor presents a character; 
he improvises with all the resources of poetry to adorn the one crown- 
ing thought, "Love is best." It is a dehberate, thoughtful valuation 
by the lover of his passion for the girl who will await him in "the 
single httle turret," as compared with the pomp and glory of the 
imperial city, which, after its "centuries of folly, noise and sin," 
lies desolate around him. Which is best? The glory of that great 
city has vanished and nature has been slowly spreading her obhterat- 
ing mantle over it all, until nothing is left but a background for this 
eternal passion of love. Thomas Nelson Page has made a similar 
comparison of the ruined civilizations of ancient days with the per- 
manency of song in his Theocritus on Agradina^ published in the 
Atlantic Monthly, August, 1906. 

The spacious cities hummed with toil; 
The monarch reared his towers to the skies; 
Men delved the fruitful soil 
And studied to be wise. 
Along the highway's rocky coil 
The mailed legions rang; 
Smiling unheeded mid the moil 
The Poet sang. 

The glittering cities long are heaps; 
The starry towers lie level with the plain; 
The desert serpent sleeps 
Where soared the marble fane. 



156 Notes and Comment 

The stealthy, bead-eyed hzard creeps 
Where gleamed the Tyrant's throne^ 
That grandeur dark Oblivion steeps,- 
The song sings on. 

Five accented lines form the running text of Love Among the Ruins, 
while the short line, usually a detached phrase, serves as a refrain or 
echo, and should be read with dehberation to keep the movement 
of the poem as a whole. 

While Browning indicates that the ruined city is an ancient Roman 
city, he does not specifically name it. Why not? Does this help or 
hinder the poem? He also fails to identify the lovers by name or 
otherwise. Why? To what purpose and feeling does the poet use 
nature description in the poem? 



One Word More (Page 44) 

This "great love-canticle," as it is called by Professor Herford, was 
written as a dedicatory epilogue for Men and Women, 1855, a volume 
which includes fifty of Browning's most notable dramatic poems, — • 
"Karshish, Cleon, Norbet, Lippo, Roland, and Andrea" men and 
women, 

Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, 
Enter each and all and use their service, 
Speak from every mouth, the speech a poem. 

In this poem, "for the first time, and the last time," he declares, 
he will speak in his own person, and yet there are but few lines which 
are frankly personal. "He strips off the veil of his art," says Professor 
Herford, "and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech 
is needless." He prefers to illustrate the truth concerning love, 
which he has found in his own experience, by example drawn from 
other lives. 

The key-truth of the poem is found in the lines: 

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
One to show a woman when he loves her. 



Notes and Comment 157 

To the world, he was Robert Browning, the poet; but there was a 
more intimate side of his personality which was open to his wife, 
but which never found voice in his poetry: 

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving: 
I am mine and yours, the rest be all men's. 

Hence came a yearning within himself and within other artists to 
find for their love a language, "fit and fair and simple and sufl&cient." 
Mrs. Browning had thus found voice in her Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese. He evidently felt that his dramatic art was quite incapable 
of saying what he wished to say to her, and he longed for a more per- 
fect expression. 

He illustrates his own feeling by four examples, by the loves of 
Raphael, Dante, and Moses, and by his fancy of the moon as a lover. 
Was Raphael a painter of Madonnas for the world? He would be a 
poet for his beloved. Was Dante a poet for the world? He would 
paint an angel for Beatrice. Was Moses a prophet and lawgiver to 
the children of Israel? He '* would fain put off the prophet." Even 
the moon, Browning declares, would turn a new side to her lover. 

5. Rafael made, etc. The anecdote concerning Raphael seems 
to be fictitious. He was devoted to Margherita, La Fornerina, 
whose likeness appears in several of his pictures, but there is no 
evidence that he addressed her in a sonnet series. 

22-24. The Madonna di San Sisto in the Dresden Gallery, 
the Madonna di Foligno in the Vatican, the Madonna del Gran- 
duca in Florence, '* represented as appearing to a votary in a 
vision," and La Belle Jardiniere in the Louvre. 

26-28. No such book of Raphael's sonnets is known, but 
Guido Reni possessed a volume of a hundred designs drawn by 
Raphael, which he left to his heir Signorini. - 

32-49. Dante says in his Vita Nuova: '^ On that day which 
fulfilled the year since my lady had been made of the citizens of 
the eternal life, remembering me of her as I sat alone, I betook 
myself to draw the resemblance of an angel on certain tablets. 
And while I did this, chancing to turn my head, I perceived that 



158 Notes and Comment 

some were standing beside me to whom I should have given 
courteous welcome, and that they were observing what I did. 
Also I learned afterward that they had been there a while be- 
fore I perceived them. Perceiving whom I rose for salutation, 
and said, ' Another was with me.' " How has Browning changed 
the tone of Dante's narrative? What purpose does this serve? 

33 and 54. Beatrice. Browning evidently intended, as the 
meter demonstrates, that the name Beatrice should be pro- 
nounced in four syllables, as in Italian, Be-a-tri-che. The abbre- 
viated endearing form of the name, Bice, line 57, should be pro- 
nounced Bee-che. 

45. The folk of his Inferno. Dante gave his foes place in 
these regions of gloom. 

58-72. The reason given here may or may not have been 
true of Raphael and Dante; it is certainly true of Browning, who 
desired to 

Put to proof art alien to the artist. 
Once and only once and for one only; 

that he might express those deeper afifections which he habit- 
ually excluded from his public verse. Dante certainly offers no 
such reason and frequently mentions his love for Beatrice. 

73-95. The reason for this is given in the example of Moses; 
" Heaven's gift," whether it be that of poet or prophet, " takes 
earth's abatement," is discounted by earthly associations and 
considerations. Browning reads more deeply into the hidden 
feeling of Moses than is revealed in the text of the Pentateuch^ 
but he was probably speaking of his own bitter memories of the 
scornful and unsympathetic criticism that he had to endure in 
large measure for many years. 

96-99. How would Browning interpret this stanza in terms of 
his own life as poet? 

101-102. Jethro's daughter — the Ethiopian bond-slave. See 
Exodus ii, 21, and Numbers xii, i. 

144-168. Even the moon which had accompanied their jour- 
ney from Italy to England in 1855 can afford him a symbol for 
his thought. So he speaks of '* the old sweet mythos " of the 



Notes and Comment 159 

moon in love with a mortal. Even she, he declares, " would 
turn a new side to her mortal." 

148. Fiesole: the ancient hill- town overlooking Florence. 

150. Samminiato: a famous church in Florence. 

163. Zoroaster: the Persian sage and astronomer who had 
given form and thought to the religion of Persia. 

164. Galileo: the famous astronomer of Florence. 

165. Homer: who celebrates the moon in his Hymn to Diana. 
165. Keats — him even: Keats, whose Endymion tells the 

fable of Endymion's love for the moon. 

174. Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu: see Exodus xxiv, i-io. 

169, 172. Proves she — proves she: introducing coordinate 
clauses — whether she be bane or blessing. 

188. My moon of poets. In a letter of August 4, 1845, he 
speaks of her as *' the moon's regality." 

188-197. Browning strongly admired his wife's poetry but his 
love was devoted to her spiritual womanhood rather than her 
genius, that deeper self which lay behind her work as poet, and 
which was but slightly known to the world. In a letter under 
date of November 10, 1845, he writes: " I believed in your 
glorious genius and knew it for a true star from the moment I 
saw it; long before I had the blessing of knowing it was my star, 
with my fortune and futurity in it. And, when I draw back 
from myself, and look better and more clearly, then I do feel, 
with you, that the writing a few letters more or less, reading 
many or few rimes of any other person, would not interfere in 
any material degree with that power of yours — that you might 
easily make one so happy and yet go on writing Geraldines and 
Berthas — but how can I, dearest, leave my heart's treasures 
long, even to look at your genius?" 

My Star (Page 52) 

This poem may be taken as a lyrical pendant of stanza xvi of One 
Word More in which the poet asserts that the moon would present to 
one it loved a face different from that the world sees. So this star 



i6o Notes and Comment 

will dartle blue and red, because ''it has opened its soul," but all 
this will be unseen even by friends. 

For all, love greatens and glorifies 
Till God 's aglow to the loving eyes, 
In what was mere earth before. 

James Lee's Wife— On the Cliff (Page 52) 

On the Cliff is but a reassertion of the same truth under a different 
figure and from a somewhat different angle. Here love overmasters 
even the sense of the ignobility of the one beloved. The cricket on 
the turf,- the butterfly on the rock are to the poet symbols of the 
transformation of the "level and low, the burnt and bare" by the 
coming of love. 

SuMMUM BoNUM (Page 54) 

In this poem he reasserted at seventy-seven what he had said forty 
years earlier in Love Among the Ruins, "love is best." It is one of a 
series of remarkable love poems in the closing volume of the poet. 

The Laboratory (Page 55) 

This is one of a series of studies of morbid passion written by Brown- 
ing during the earlier years of his art, portraying with strong dramatic 
sense a series of persons utterly remote from his own wholesome, 
optimistic nature. The stories and personages are in each case en- 
tirely fictitious, but they are true typically of the various ages and 
countries represented. They are mere sketches resulting from Brown- 
ing's reading of history. 

The Laboratory gives a ghmpse of one of those corrupt ages when 
poisoning was practiced as a fine art ; imperial Rome and Renaissance 
Italy were alike infamous in this art, and from the latter, the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists drew many a gruesome story for the stage. Com- 
pare the poisoned rapier of Hamlet and the Queen's attempts in 
Cymbeline. Browning, however, preferred to use France under the 
old regime, when this Italianate vice had been imported into the 
northern court. 



Notes and Comment i6i 

The scene is graphically real. The slight girl in full evening dress, 
adorned with her jewels for the dance at the King's, is talking in the 
laboratory to the grim, sullen old chemist. She has gone to him for a 
poison with which to poison her rival, the large, splendid beauty 
who had stolen her lover and laughed at her while doing it. Fierce, 
murderous jealousy has taken possession of the fair young creature, 
until she is all but insane. She exults in the thought of her rival lying 
dead at her feet. In her ecstasy of hate as she snatches the deadly 
mixture, she kisses the old man and presses upon him a rich jewel, 
her whole fortune's fee; then hastens away to dance at the King's. ^ 

Is such a picture of hatred justifiable artistically? To what extent 
does Browning explain the causes of her jealousy? How can you 
elaborate the story of the lover and the two ladies to explain the 
hatred more fully? If this is regarded as a single scene from a whole 
tragic drama, how would you reconstruct the remainder of the drama? 
Tell the story of the preceding scene when the lady had been jilted 
by her lover and ridiculed by her triumphant rival. Tell how she 
used the poison, and ended the tragedy. 

Count Gismond (Page 57) 

Browning has here taken one of the commonplaces of the tales of 
chivalry, — the rescue of a wronged maiden, such as Ivanhoe's rescue 
of Rebecca; but he has made something new out of it by his method 
of treatment. Such stories have usually been told for the thrilHng 
narrative, or for elaborately picturesque description. But Browning 
puts these aside and asks one question. How did the victim feel 
when the iron of this cruel accusation entered her soul, and how did 
the rescue touch the deeper springs of her womanhood? Not what 
the man did, but what the woman felt was of primary importance. 
With characteristic chivalry he defended the woman's honor. The 
story seems to have been of Browning's invention, and shows the 
working of his mind on the tale of chivalry. "The motive of the 
poem," writes Dowden, "is essentially that of the Perseus and An- 
dromeda myth refined upon and medievahzed." 

The woman herself, after the flight of several years, is telling the 



i62 Notes and Comment 

story to her bosom friend, Adela, in a rare burst of confidence. By 
some sudden rise of feeling she had exclaimed 

Christ God who savest man, save most 
Of men Count Gismond, who saved me! 

Then the story of the rescue, which has probably never before passed 
her lips, comes spontaneously. She implies rather than tells of her 
orphanage, not without its girlish happiness among her cousins. 
How unaffectedly in the third stanza she assures her reader of her 
beauty! We catch a hint of the jealousy against her and of the dark 
intrigue to slay her honor and her lovely maidenhood. Of the lists 
themselves and the progress of the tourney — a Uterary opportunity 
which Scott and the Romanticists would have seized for elaborate 
word pictures and for thrilling incident — she has little to say. For 
her, only a few moments of that day live in her memory — the fright- 
ful shock of Gauthier's false accusation, Gismond's "back-handed 
blow" that slew the lie, the brief encounter of the two knights, Gis- 
mond kneeling before her for the moment, and then at her side as 
they "two walked forth to nevermore return." Only the incidents 
which reveal character at the crisis are retained. The reader must 
picture the scene for himself, if he is more interested in that than in 
the woman's feelings. 

Compare with this poem the romantic stories of Scott, Keats, and 
Shelley in Lochinvar, The Eve of St, Agnes,' smd The Fugitives, and 
the elopement in Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor. 

Miss Barrett, in telling Browning of her brother's accidental death 
several years before, writes: 

"Remember how you wrote in your Gismond: 

What says the body when they spring 
Some monstrous torture-engine's whole 
Strength on it? No more says soul. 

And you never wrote anything which lived with me more than that. 
It is such a dreadful truth. But you know it for truth, I hope, by 
your genius, and not by such proof as mine." It was indeed "by his 
genius" that he saw this truth, the dramatic realization of a state of 
spirit he had never felt. 



Notes and Comment 163 

The Glove (Page 62) 

This poem is based on an old story told by Poullain de St. Croix in 
his Essays on Paris: "One day while Francis the first was amusing 
himself with looking at a combat between his lions, a lady having let 
her glove drop, said to De Lorges, * If you would have me beUeve you 
love me as much as you swear you do, go, and bring back my glove.' 
De Lorges went down and picked up the glove from amidst the fero- 
cious beasts, returned, and threw it in the lady's face, and in spite 
of all her advances and cajoleries, would never look at her again." 
Schiller seeing this story, wrote his ballad in June, 1797, and straight- 
way sent it to Goethe. Nearly forty years later, Leigh Hunt printed 
his version of the story, which greatly increased the lady's shame. 
Browning, evidently in retort to Hunt, produced his poem, chival- 
rously defending the lady from the insult and ignominy. Miss Barrett 
wrote to Browning: "For your Glove all women should be grateful,— 
and Ronsard, honored in this fresh shower of music on his old grave — 
though the chivalry of the interpretation, as well as so much beside, 
is so plainly yours could only be yours, perhaps. And even you are 
forced to let in a third person — close to the doorway — before you can 
do any good. What a noble lion you give us too, with the 'flash on 
his forehead' and leagues in the desert already' as we look on him — ■ 
And the lady's speech — so calm and proud — yet a little bitter." 

Schiller's poem, translated by Bulwer-Lytton, and Hunt's are 
subjoined for comparison. 

The Glove 

Translated from Schiller 

Before his lion-court. 
To see the griesly sport, 

Sate the king; 
Beside him grouped his princely peers,. 
And dames aloft, in circling tiers, 

Wreath'd round their blooming ring. 

King Francis, where he sate. 
Raised a finger — ^yawned the gate, 
And, slow from his repose, 
A lion §oes| 



164 Notes and Comment 

Dumbly he gazed around 
The foe-encircled ground; 
And, with a lazy gape, 
He stretched his lordly shape, 
And shook his careless mane, 
And — laid him down again. 

A finger raised the King — 
And nimbly have the guard 
A second gate unbarred; 
Forth, with a rushing spring, 
A tiger sprung! 
Wildly the wild one yelled 
When the lion he beheld; 
And, bristling at the look. 

With his tail his sides he strook, 

And rolled his rabid tongue; 
In many a wary ring 
He swept round the forest king, 
With a fell and rattling sound; — 
And laid him on the ground, 
Grommelling ! 

The King raised his finger; then 
Leaped two leopards from the den 

With a bound; 
And boldly bounded they 
Where the crouching tiger lay 
Terrible ! 
And he gripped the beasts in his deadly hold; 
In the grim embrace they grappled and rolled; 
Rose the lion with a roar! 
And stood the strife before; 
And the wild cats on the spot. 
From the blood-thirst, wroth and hot, 

Hahed still! 
Now from the balcony above, 
A snowy hand let fall a glove; 
Midway between the beasts of prey, 
Lion and tiger; there it lay, 
The winsome lady's glove! 

Fair Cunigonde said, with a lip of scorn 

To the knight De Lorges — **If the love you have sworn 

Were as gallant and leal as you boast it to be, 

I might ask you to bring back that glove to me!" 



Notes and Comment 165 

The knight left the place where the lady sate; 
The knight he has passed through the fearful gate; 
The lion and tiger he stooped above, 
And his fingers have closed on the lady's glove! 

All shuddering and stunned, they beheld him there — 

The noble knights and the ladies fair; 

But loud was the joy and the praise the while 

He bore back the glove with his tranquil smile ! 

With a tender look in her softening eyes. 

That promised reward to his warmest sighs, 

Fair Cunigonde rose her knight to grace. 

He tossed the glove in the lady's face ! 

"Nay, spare me the guerdon, at least," quoth he; 

And he left forever that fair ladye ! 

The Glove and the Lions 

King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport. 

And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court; 

The nobles filled the benches, with the ladies by their side. 

And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he 

sighed. 
And truly 't was a gallant thing to see that crowning show. 
Valor and love; and a king above; and the royal beasts below. 

Ramped and roared the Hons, with horrid laughing jaws; 

They bit, they glared, gave blows like bears, a wind went with their 

paws; 
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another. 
Till all the pit with sand and mane, was in a thunderous smother; 
The bloody foam above the bars came whizzing through the air. 
Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we 're better here than there." 

De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame. 

With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the 

same; 
She thought, the Count, my lover is brave as brave can be; 
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me; 
"King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine; 
I '11 drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine." 

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and 

smiled; 
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild: 



i66 Notes and Comment 

The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place, 
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face. 
"By heaven!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where 

he sat: 
"No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that." 

Compare these three versions carefully. Which uses the story to 
best advantage? What differences are there in the treatment of the 
lion? How does Browning minimize the leap into the pit? How does 
Browning interpret the flinging of the glove? How does he interpret 
the character of De Lorge? Why does he add the humbler suitor 
who follows the lady from the court? Is anything gained by using 
the monologue instead of direct narration? Why should Browning use 
Ronsard as the narrator, rather than De Lorge or the Lady? Weigh 
well each phase of Miss Barrett's comment. Note that Browning 
found certain suspicions of the affection of De Lorge in St. Croix. 
How does Browning allow the lady to speak for herself? 

Peter Ronsard. Ronsard was one of the chief poets of the 
time of King Francis, and Browning contrasts him with Clement 
Marot (line 45), a fellow-poet of the same day, who was more 
conventional and artificial. 

12. Naso: Publius Ovidius Naso, the poet Ovid, the poet of 
fine sentiment and polite sayings. 

14. Men are the merest Ixions. They devote themselves to 
fruitless and impossible tasks — a moral platitude, which wearies 
the King. 

48. Versifies David the Psalmist. Marot versified forty-nine 
of the Psalms. 

50. Ilium Juda Leonem de Tribu: " the Lion of the Tribe of 
Judah." See Revelation v, 5. 

162. Nemean: referring to the fable of the Nemean lion which 
Hercules overcame. 



MucKLE-MouTH Meg (Page 68) 

The story of Muckle-Mouth Meg is one of the countless folk-tales 
gleaned by Scott in his rovings through the Border country, for he was 



Notes and Comment 167 

always a lover of a good story. He tells it in his own inimitable way 
in a letter dated Edinburgh, June 29, 1802: ''I have some thoughts 
of attempting a Border ballad in the comic manner; but I almost 
despair of bringing it well out. A certain Sir WiUiam Scott, from 
whom I am descended, was ill-advised enough to plunder the estate 
of Sir Gideon Murray of EHbank, ancestor to the present Lord Eh- 
bank. The marauder was defeated, seized, and brought in fetters 
to the castle of Ehbank, on the Tweed. The Lady Murray (agreeably 
to the custom of all ladies in ancient tales) was seated on the battle- 
ments, and descried the return of her husband with his prisoners. 
She immediately inquired what he meant to do with the young 
Knight of Harden, which was the petit titre of Sir WiUiam Scott. 
'Hang the robber, assuredly,' was the answer of Sir Gideon. * What ! ' 
answered the lady, *hang the handsome young Knight of Harden, 
when I have three ill-favored daughters unmarried! No, no, Sir 
Gideon, we '11 force him to marry our Meg.' Now tradition says that 
Meg Murray was the ugliest woman in the four counties, and that 
she was called, in the homely dialect of the time, meikle-mouthed Meg. 
Sir Gideon, like a good husband and tender father, entered into his 
wife's sentiments, and proffered to Sir Wilham the alternative of 
becoming his son-in-law, or decorating with his carcase the kindly 
gallows of Ehbank. The lady was so very ugly that Sir Wilham, the 
handsomest man of his time, positively refused the honor of her 
hand. Three days were allowed him to make up his mind; and it 
was not till he found one end of a rope made fast to his neck, and the 
other knitted to a sturdy oak bough, that his resolution gave way, 
and he preferred an ugly wife to the literal noose. It is said that 
they were afterward a very happy couple." (Lockhart's Life of Scott.) 
Scott apparently failed to write the proposed comic ballad, but turned 
the task over to his friend James Ballantyne, whose version is given 
in Stedman's Victorian Anthology. 

Browning was doubtless acquainted with both versions of the 
story and probably wrote his own in a sheer sense of the fun in the 
incident, this too when he was past seventy-five years of age. Com- 
pare the three versions for their effectiveness. What features did 
Browning add to the story? Which author handles the cUmax of 



i68 Notes and Comment 

the story best? Could the character element be increased in these 
versions? Which is best adapted in its Hterary style to the tale? 
3. Chiel: a fellow. 
7. Gallant: lad. 
21. Parritch: porridge. 
31. Bubbly jock: a turkey. 
39. Minnikin-mou' : tiny-mouth. 

My Last Duchess (Page 70) 

We have here a tragedy in fifty-six lines. One of the great Italian 
noblemen of the later Renaissance is conversing with a messenger, 
come to negotiate a marriage for his master's daughter. They have 
been viewing the art collections of this noble connoisseur, and come 
at last to a curtained picture. That picture is the key to the Duke's 
character, and his life-story. Fr^ Pandolf (a purely fictitious artist) 
had caught "the spot of joy" on the Duchess' cheek, ''the depth and 
passion of her earnest glance," and the "faint half-flush that dies 
along her throat" till the stranger, startled by the soul in the picture, 
had turned, and seemed, as "he would ask, if he durst, how such a 
glance came there." So the Duke superciliously tells the story of 
the beautiful, joyous, young wife, who had come for a brief time as 
mistress of the magnificent palace. Her simplicity, her gladness of 
heart, her plebeian kindliness unfitted her for the conventional digni- 
ties of the Duke, her master. She gave deadly offense when she 
ranked his "gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's 
gift." "Who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling," he comments 
scornfully, and there is something of defeated egotism in his "I choose 
never to stoop." With a brutal sense of mastery, he "gave com- 
mands; then all smiles stopped together." The poet was questioned 
several times as to the "commands," but usually evaded direct an- 
swer. But he once replied "Yes, I meant he had her put to death." 
Then as an afterthought, he added "Or he might have her put in a 
nunnery." Some have claimed that the Duke slew her rather by the 
slower, more cruel means of repressing her life and cutting it off from 
all joy. Which explanation do you prefer? Why did Browning add 
the thought of the nunnery? 



Notes and Comment 169 

The Duke represents the whole group of master-connoisseurs of 
the late Renaissance, whose patronage of art and pride in their 
collections were quite divorced from the finer life of the spirit, which 
Browning sought and admired in artist and art-lover alike. The 
poet has invented the story and character of the Duchess to assist 
him in portraying the Duke^s character, but the reader's interest 
quickly passes to her; for her soul shines through the words of even 
her unsympathetic husband. 

Was there any good artistic reason for Browning's use of fictitious 
rather than real artists in Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck? 

Ferrara. The Dukes of Ferrara were among the most notable 
patrons of art in Renaissance Italy. 

3, 16. Fra Pandolf: a purely imaginary artist. 

56. Claus of Innsbruck: an imaginary worker in bronze. 

The Flight of the Duchess (Page 72) 

As My Last Duchess represents the tragic ruin of joyous girlhood 
in the power of a harsh, formal master, so The Flight of the Duchess 
is the comedy of her escape from such ruthless bondage. The times, 
persons, and places in the two poems are professedly dififerent, but 
the essential relations of the girl-wife and her conventionalized hus- 
band are the same in both. 

The ladies are closely akin spiritually; their gladness, simplicity, 
spontaneity, their unconsciousness of conventional bonds, unfit them 
for the purely formal life of a fine lady. They are true sisters, and 
have much in common with Colombe and Pippa of the dramas. The 
two Dukes are likewise akin in their formality, their sense of propriety, 
their self-importance, an egotism so overmastering as to shut their 
sympathies from all else beyond their own person. The Duke of 
Ferrara, however, is far the more accurate picture of the high-born 
noble, in spite of his dabbling in art, which touches the mere outside 
of his nature; he is a hard, strong man, dangerous to all opposition. 
The other Duke is rather a caricature of the fine gentleman with a 
hobby; he is no longer terrible, he is merely ridiculous. The poet de- 
lights in exposing his feeble attempts at intelligence and dignity. 



170 Notes and Comment 

much as Dickens did with Lord Deadlock in Bleak House. These 
men are suited respectively to tragic and comic plots. Browning 
must have been stirred to strong indignation against the first Duke 
and his brutality, and he vented his feeling by creating the second 
Duke. On him he takes a comic vengeance and for him creates a 
retribution in the flight of the Duchess from her grand castle to the 
freedom and love of the gipsy camp. 

The poem, Browning once declared, took shape around the refrain 
of a song he had heard in boyhood ''Following the Queen of the 
Gipsies!" "It is an odd fact," he wrote to Miss Barrett, '' that of 
the poem, the real conception of an evening, (two years ago, fully) 
not a line is written. . . . But as I conceived the poem, it consisted 
entirely of the Gipsy's description of the life the Lady was to lead 
with her future Gipsy lover — a real Hfe, not an unreal one like that 
with the Duke. And as I meant to write it, all their wild adventures 
would have come out, and the insignificance of the former vegetation 
have been deducible only — as the main subject has become now." 

The first two hundred lines of the poem were "given to poor 
Thomas Hood in his emergency at a day's notice," wrote Browning. 
It was printed in full in Bells and Pomegranates that same year, 1845. 
Miss Barrett declared: "Be sure she will be the world's Duchess and 
be received as one of your most striking poems. Full of varied power 
the poem is. I cannot say how deeply it has impressed me." Miss 
Barrett speaks in other letters of her impression of the remarkable 
metrical effects of the poem. " The rhythm of that Duchess does more 
and more strike me as a new thing; something Hke (if like anything) 
what the Greeks called pedestrian meter — between meter and prose — 
the difl&cult rimes combining quite curiously with the easy looseness 
of the general measure." And again: "the Duchess appears to me 
more than ever new-minted golden coin — the rhythm of it answering 
to your own description, ' speech half-asleep, or song half-awake.' 
You have right of trove to these novel effects of rhythm." And in 
still another place: "Your perfect rimes, perfectly new, and all clash- 
ing together as by natural attraction, had put me at once to shame 
and admiration." 

Browning uses double rimes with surprising ease and frequency 



Notes and Comment 171 

and occasionally uses triple rimes. The verse is dominantly four- 
accented and most of the apparently irregular lines should be tuned 
to this rhythm; but there are a few two and three accented lines. 
Yet the effect of the verse on the ear is varied incessantly and widely 
by all sorts of metrical liberties. "The incantation scene, just trench- 
ing on the supernatural, is wonderful," wrote Mrs. Browning, and 
the change of tone has been effected by cutting the Hne down to the 
four accented iambic. 

From whose Hps does Browning tell the story of the flight? What 
other possible narrators might he have chosen? What advantages 
and disadvantages in each case? What characteristics of the style 
of the poem may be attributed to the dramatic presentation of this 
speaker? Is the speaker's attitude dramatically true to his place as 
"servitor"? Does his attitude toward the old Duchess remain 
dramatically true to the "servitor," or does Browning's own feeling 
thrust itself into the story? What seems to be Browning's attitude 
toward the flight? What is his attitude toward the gipsy-queen? 
What is the theme of the gipsy's incantation, and how does it appeal 
directly to the Duchess? Would a more definite identification of 
the time and place of the action, as in Scott's poems, have bettered 
the effect of the romance? 

The Guardian-Angel (Page 96) 

This poem gives us Browning's own personal response to a beautiful 
picture by Guercino, of which he writes: 

We were at Fano, and three times we went 

To sit and see him in his chapel there. 
And drink his beauty to our soul's content. 

Of this experience Mrs. Browning wrote to Miss Mitford, Aug. 24, 
1848: 

"As for ourselves we have scarcely done so well, yet well; having 
enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent 
us to Fano as ^a delightful summer residence for an English family,' 
and we found it uninhabitable from heat, vegetation scorched to 
paleness, the very air swooning in the sun. *A circulating library' 



1/2 Notes and Comment 

which does not give out books, and 'a refined and intellectual Italian 
society' (I quote Murray), which never reads a book through, com- 
plete the advantages of the place, yet the churches are beautiful, and 
a divine picture of Guercino is worth going all that way to see," 
Browning sent the poem with a postscript, here omitted, to his friend, 
Alfred Dommett, far away in New Zealand. 

At the Mermaid (Page 97) 

This is the supposed speech of Shakespeare to his boon companions 
at the Mermaid Tavern, where he enjoyed the company of some of 
the most famous wits and dramatists of the age. Shakespeare is 
responding to a toast by Ben Jonson, who has just pledged him as 
"next poet," succeeding Spenser, the "dead King" (died 1599). 
Shakespeare laughs away the proffered honor 

I "Next poet"? No, my hearties, 
I nor am, nor fain would be. 

Browning presents here the fine lack of self-consciousness in that 
type of great genius, which is great, but entirely without the pose of 
greatness. To his friends Shakespeare will always be "friend, good 
fellow, gentle Will." He tries to prove his disclaimer by showing 
he lacks all the more ideal traits of the bard's character; for he is 
entirely reserved and impersonal in his art, and he has not a touch of 
misanthropic bitterness toward the world around him. Browning is 
probably true to the real Shakespeare in these matters,, but he is evi- 
dently thinking also of his own attitude toward the artistic maladies 
of excessive personalism and the misanthropy in the Romantic verse 
of the preceding generation, particularly in the poetry of Byron and 
the German Romanticists. And Browning forgets the dramatic 
purport of his speech when he makes such references to Byron as 
"the Pilgrim," stanza xi. 

None of our later poets have been so belligerently anti-personal as 
Browning. In his essay on Shelley, he makes a distinction between 
subjective and objective poetry, evidently giving his admiration 
more largely to the latter. In his House he even denies the personal 



Notes and Comment 173 

interpretation of the sonnets of Shakespeare. Yet the poetry of 
his predecessors, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, had been strongly 
subjective. Browning seems to use Shakespeare in ^/ The Mermaid 
to utter his own preference for objective verse, to which most of his 
own endeavor had been directed: 

Here 's my work : does work discover 

. . . my life?" 
Here 's the work I hand, this scroll, 
Yours to take or leave; as duly 
Mine remains the vmproffered soul. 

Browning as well as Shakespeare is represented when the speaker 
goes on to disclaim all Byronic misanthropy, or Teutonic welt schmerz. 
"Have you found your hfe distasteful?'' he questions, "my Hfe did 
and does smack sweet." 

I find earth not grey but rosy, 

Heaven not grim but fair of hue. 
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. 

Do I stand and stare? AH 's blue. 

This is Browning's own optimism and joy in life asserting itself, 
and by a paradox of art, he is truly personal in these verses while 
praising the impersonality of the master poet. We have here a 
characteristic breakdown of the impersonal dramatic art when the 
mask half slips aside from the face and betrays the ill-concealed poet. 

The figure that thou here seest, etc.: an adaptation of Ben 
Jonson's lines concerning the portrait woodcut in the first folio 
of Shakespeare's works. 

16. The dead king: probably referring to Spenser who died 
at the time when Shakespeare was just reaching the height of 
his reputation. 

50. Orichalc: bronze; so called by Shakespeare. 

81. Your Pilgrim: a purposely anachronistic reference to Byron, 
the author of the Pilgrimage of Childe Harold. 

103. Marlowe: Shakespeare's famous predecessor in tragedy. 

104, 128. Ben: Ben Jonson, who was one of Shakespeare's 
greatest contemporaries and most cordial admirers. 



1/4 Notes and Comment 

The Boy and the Angel (Page 102) 

This papal legend from an undetermined source has the simplicity 
of a miracle tale. Browning does not attempt to put it into monologue 
form. Why? Note that the exclamation Praise God in lines 2 and 8 
takes the time of two full metrical feet and should be pronounced 
with fullness of sound and raised voice. 



Amphibian (Page 106) 

This poem like On the Cliff is not a dramatic monologue, but is a 
metaphor suggested by the experience told in the five opening stanzas. 
Passing on through the questions in the seventh and eighth stanzas, 
he thinks of "a certain soul," his wife, who had been dead eleven 
years, looking down upon the "one who in the world, both lives and 
likes Hfe's way," but who in the duality of his life, amphibian, may 
escape from the "worldly noise and dust" into the sphere of poetry, 
where 

Emancipate through passion, 

And thought, with sea for sky, 
We substitute, in a fashion, 

For heaven, — ^poetry. 

Such seems to have been the meaning and value of poetry in these 
later years to Robert Browning, who to all outward appearances was 
a thoroughly satisfied worldHng. The final stanza, rising to the 
thought of Mrs. Browning, is one of the rare escapes of his personally 

private feeling into his poetry. 

» 

Among the Rocks (Page 109) 

Among the Rocks goes on to a kindred thought: If love thus stoops 
to the ignoble, is it not debased? How of this exalting love which 
misappraises the base and bare? The elemental forces of nature in 
sea and earth with their strong restorative power, answer 

If you loved only what were worth your love. 

Love were clear gain and wholly well for you: 

Make the low nature better by your throes, 



Notes and Comment 175 

Rabbi Ben Ezra (Page no) 

Is it for nothing we grow old, 
We whom God loves? 

Death in the Desert. 

By the spirit, when age shall overcome thee, thou still shalt enjoy 
More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy. 

Saul. 

Rabbi Ben Ezra (1090-1166) was a learned Spanish Jew, commen- 
tator on the Old Testament, scholar, and philosopher. Browning had 
referred to him ten years before in Holy Cross Day, ascribing to him 
the grand hymn with which that poem closes. Yet Browning has 
made almost no attempt to reahze dramatically the personaHty and 
situation of the venerable Rabbi, and uses him as a mere mouthpiece 
for his own utterance of truth. Browning, possibly by reason of 
the living example of his own father, had come to regard age not as 
a time oppressed by decrepitude, but as endowed with vision and 
spiritual power. Contrast with this Tennyson's By an Evolutionist, 
Arnold's Growing Old, and Longfellow's sonnet of farewell to his books. 
This hopeful view of old age, which is so sincere with Browning, is 
but incidental in the poem to the larger truths which came straight 
from Browning's personal convictions concerning the problems of 
existence, — the union of soul and body, the overmastering violence 
of the body-passion, the presence of sin and sorrow in the world, the 
ineffective aspirations of the human heart, the progress from youth 
and strength to age and infirmity, life beyond death, and the Divine 
attitude toward humanity. The poem should accordingly be studied 
without regard to its dramatic form, and solely for its utterance of 
truth. 

2. The best is yet to be. Compare the Inn Albtim, Book IV: 

My Hfe's remainder, which, say what fools will, 

Is, or should be the best of Hfe, — its fruit. 

All tends to, root and stem and leaf and flower. 

7, ID. Flowers, stars: that is, pleasures and ideals. 

16. I prize the doubt. Browning speaks repeatedly of the 



176 Notes and Comment 

value of doubt as a quickener of the spiritual struggle through 
which man grows. 

17. Low kinds: the lower animals which are untroubled by 
the Divine spark. Compare line 28. 

19-21. Poor vaunt of life, etc. Browning's rebuke to the 
hedonists who measure all values in life by their pleasure-giving 
quality. 

24. Irks care: does care, irk, or overburden? 

25-26. That which doth provide. Browning elaborates this 
thought in The Eagle^ one of the Ferishtah Fancies. 

28. Spark: a favorite figure in Browning for the Divine in man. 

31-36. Then welcome, etc. This welcoming of the difficul- 
ties of life for their disciplinary value is frequent in Browning. 

40-41. What I aspired to be, etc. Compare 

'T is not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do. 

Saul. 
Better have failed in the high aim as I, 
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed. 

Inn Album. 

That low man seeks a little thing to do, 

Sees it and does it. 
This high man, with a great aim to pursue; 

Dies ere he knows it. 

Grammarian^ s Funeral. 

44. Whose flesh hath soul to suit: Whose soul is so debased 
as to fit the mere animal needs of the body. 

45. Whose spirit, etc. Compare Easter Day, xx: 

Thy choice was earth: thou didst attest 
'T was better spirit should subserve 
The flesh, than flesh refine to nerve 
Beneath the spirit's play. 

49-54. Yet gifts should prove their use, etc. Browning had 
nothing of the ascetic in him, and with Fra Lippo Lippi declares: 

This world 's no blot for us. 
Nor blank, it means intensely and means good: 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 

See also Saul^ stanza ix. 



Notes and Comment 177 

57. I who saw power, etc. This coupling of the divine Love 
with the divine Power as constituting his conception of the God- 
head is repeatedly found in Browning's religious poems, in Para- 
celsus, in Easter Day, in A Death in the Desert, and in the Pope's 
monologue, The Ring and the Book. 

65-66. Possessions of the brute. See Cleon's account of the 
physical perfection of the animal mechanism: 

the shell sucks fast the rock, 
The fish strikes through the sea, . . . the birds take flight. 
Till life's mechanics can no further go. 

68. Spite of the flesh, etc.: the usual formula of the ascetic, 
ijot infrequently degenerating into cant. 
72. Nor soul helps flesh more now, etc. Compare Saul, 151: 

In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. 

79-84. And I shall, etc. Browning again refers to the ac- 
tivity and strife beyond the grave in the Epilogue to Asolando. 

90. I shall know being old. Compare stanza xx. 

91-96. When evening shuts, etc. Note carefully the signifi- 
cance of this simile. 

102. The Past. Compare Une 50. 

1 14. Wait death nor be afraid. This is elaborated in Pros pice. 

115-117. Enough now, etc. Man has attained sufficiently in 
this earthly life if he has come to know divine Light and Truth 
as well as he knows his own hand. 

124-126. Was I, the world arraigned, right, etc. In age he 
would at last find out the truth of many a moral debate in his 
former years. 

133-138. Not on the vulgar mass, etc. Browning's great dec- 
laration of the moral value of motive rather than deed. Com- 
pare The Ring and the Book, x, 470-474: 

The inward work and worth 
Of any mind, what other mind may judge 
Save God, who only knows the thing he made. 
The veritable service he exacts? 
It is the outward product men appraise. 



178 Notes and Comment 

151-186. That Potter^s wheel, etc. The metaphor of the 
potter's wheel is taken from Jeremiah xviii (repeated in Isaiah liv, 
8), but it is elaborated by Browning to suit his belief that God is 
moulding the individual man in the probation of earthly life 
for higher lives beyond. 

156. Seize to-day. The carpe diem of the Epicurean phi- 
losophers, which has been paraphrased, " Eat, drink, and be 
merry, for to-morrow we die " — a doctrine far removed from the 
virile strength of Browning. It has been exquisitely paraphrased 
by Tennyson in the Ancient Sage. 

157-162. Ail that is, etc. In Aht Vogler Browning declares: 
" The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; what was 
good shall be good." 

170-174. Laughing loves . . . skuU-thmgs: symbolic of the 
gayeties of youth over against the gravity of age. 

180. Heaven's consummate cup: that is, the perfected spir- 
itual being, wrought by the ordeal of life, will have no further 
need of earth. 

181-192. But I need, etc. The two closing stanzas form an 
invocation as the poet turns to God in submissive prayer, less 
eloquently and with less fervor of religious passion than is shown 
in the same turning to God by David and Abt Vogler. 

Saul (Page 118) 

The suggestion for this poem evidently came to Browning from 
I Samuel, xvi, 23 : ''And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God 
was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand: 
so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from 
him." The poet has tried to realize by his imagination the situation, 
and to re-utter the course of song by which the glad-hearted shepherd 
boy cheered the despondent King. But it is more than the song of 
David to Saul, it is the song of faith and gladness in the heart of 
man as he views life wholesomely over against the despondency of 
the embittered and disillusioned spirit. It is to a certain extent 
Browning's own optimism singing his own joy. 



Notes and Comment 179 

The poem might well be called David rather than Saul as the latter 
is purely secondary. Saul would relapse in his bitterness. But David 
in searching his heart for a ministration of joy to the suffering King 
had had a vision which confirmed him as a Seer of the Almighty. 
Henceforth he would be a prophet to his people. He is supposed to 
be telling his experience the day following when the spiritual excite- 
ment has somewhat waned, to some nameless auditor — possibly his 
father Jesse. Why did Browning leave this auditor unindentified? 
Why neglect to make real the scene and setting in which David tells 
the story while he realizes so vividly the scene between David and 
Saul? 

The poem consists of four movements of this song of the good of 
Hfe, arranged in climax, as David rises from truth to truth, the move- 
ments separated by descriptive and narrative interludes that give 
setting and significance to the song. 

The first presents David's simple joy in the commonplace things 
of his common life — his own shepherd song, the songs of the wild 
creatures of field and pasture, and the song of the homely community 
of interest in wedding and funeral and the common toil of man. It 
is the song of happy youth. 

Next he presents the exhilaration of a more vital and thrilling 
life — of the man alive to his finger-tips, throbbing with pent-up 
physical energy, keenly and interestedly responsive to the whole 
human drama around him. Though it is more passionate, more 
ecstatic, it is still a merely earthly Hfe. "Oh, the wild joys of Hving," 
leaps naturally to his lips. As he says later in the poem: "Song filled 
to the verge his cup with the wine of this life." 

The third song sings the joy of personality and of personal influence. 
From the strong masterful life power flows unceasingly, and this 
sense of personal power is a joy. Saul, Browning, every strong man 
will respond to the utterance : 

each ray of thy will. 
Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill 
Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth 
A like cheer to their sons . . . 
With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. 



i8o Notes and Comment 

This fame has estabhshed Saul as one of the master influences among 
his nation. David could offer Saul no higher ground of joy, and the 
King responsive to the cry "Then first of the mighty, thank God 
that thou art," '' slowly resumed his old motions and attitudes 
kingly." 

At last, as David yearned to give an even higher joy, the joy in 
immortality, "the Truth came upon him." Like a flash he realized 
God's love and God's provision against man's sin and weakness, the 
love of God, the Father, as revealed in Jesus Christ. We have here 
not merely the prophecy of the actual David, but the deeper religious 
thought of Browning himself. This song is the culmination of the 
poem, and rises steadily to the words "See the Christ stand." 

In the last stanza of the poem, the high prophetic passion modulates 
quietly back to common life and thought through the descriptions 
of nature and of her quiet at the hour of dawn. 

The poem as originally printed in 1845, in Bells and Pomegranates 
consisted merely of the first nine stanzas; the remainder was added 
ten years later while Browning was writing his great series of poems 
known as Men and Women. What is the comparative value of the 
longer* and shorter versions? Does the portion added change the 
purpose and effect of the poem? Is there any change in literary style 
in the addition? 

The metrical movement of the poem is a vigorous chant in five 
accented, anapestic lines. The poet has taken unusual liberties with 
the pattern verse, some for the moment seemingly irreducible to the 
regular movement, yet when properly read, the verse keeps its march. 
Note that in line 97, the words King Saul by dehberate, impressive 
enunciation take the full time of two metrical feet. The poem was 
originally printed in short lines of three and two accents alternately, 
thus : 

Oh all, all the world offers singly. 

On one head combine, 
On one head the joy and the pride, 

Even rage Hke the throe 
That opes the rock, helps its glad labor. 

And lets the gold go — 



Notes and Comment i8l 

And ambition that sees a sun lead it, 

Oh, all of these— all 
Combine to unite in one creature 

—Saul! 

Compare the revised form of these closing lines of stanza ix. 



Prospice (Page 137) 

Look Forward: This is the challenge cry of Browning, our modern 
Mr. Greatheart, as he faces the thought of death, not an impersonal 
dramatic lyric voicing the feeling of another. It was written only a 
few months after the death of Mrs. Browning, and was first pub- 
lished in the Atlantic Monthly out of regard for his many American 
readers. The **Arch Fear" of death has no terror for him; he, "who 
was ever a fighter," can shout, ''one fight more, the best and the 
last," in spite of the "power of the night" and the dread of the ''black 
minute." The rhetoric of this earlier half is full of the sinewy strength 
of the defiance, which modulates into a softer note as he thinks of 
reunion with Mrs. Browning. The final climax of spiritual ecstasy 
is one of Browning's noblest words. 

Compare with it Browning's version of Hercules facing the appari- 
tion of death in Balaustion's Adventure^ his version of the Alcestis 
of Euripides: 

I will go and lie in wait for Death, black-stoled 
King of corpses! I shall find him, sure 
Drinking beside the tomb, o' the sacrifice: 
And if I lie in ambuscade, and leap 
Out of my lair, and seize, encircle him, 
There lives not one shall pull him from mer 
. . . before he let the woman go. 

One summons of the whole magnific frame; 

Each sinew to its service, — up he caught, 

And over shoulder cast, the lion-shag, 

Let the club go, — for had he not those hands? 

And so went striding off ... to the suburb tomb. 

"Death," said Browning when its shadow was over him, "is life; 
just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive 



1 82 Notes and Comment 

and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is 
our crape-like, churchyard word for change, for growth, there could 
be no prolongation of that which we call life. For myself, I deny 
death as an end of anything. Never say of me that I am dead." 

Epilogue to Asolando (Page 138) 

The Epilogue to Asolando, written in the closing weeks of Brown- 
ing's life to bring his last volume to a close, is the poet's farewell to 
those who had loved him, but who after his death will sorrow for 
the queuing of his great spirit, a spirit well described in the third 
stanza. " No," he cries, ^' Greet the unseen with a cheer," for in 
the great unknown beyond death he will still be going forward 
valiantly in the same great moral struggle which calls forth his 
energies '' there as here." Compare with it Tennyson's Crossing 
the Bar and Longfellow's sonnet of farewell, Wapentake. 



JBrxQlisb IReabiuGB for Scbools 

Wilbur L. Cross, Yale University, General Editor 

Addison: Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. 

Edited by Nathaniel E. Griffin, Princeton University. 

Arnold: Sohrab and Rustum, and Other Poems. 
Edited by Walter S. Hinchman, Groton School. 

Browning: Selections. 

Edited by Charles W. Hodell, Goucher College, Baltimore. 

Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress, Part I. 

Edited by John H. Gardiner, Harvard University. 

Burke: On Conciliation. 

Edited by Daniel V. Thompson, Lawrenceville School. 

Byron: Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems. 
Edited by Hardin Craig, University of Minnesota. 

Defoe: Robinson Crusoe. 

Edited by Wilbur L. Cross, Yale University. 

Dickens : Tale of Two Cities. 

Edited by E. H. Kemper McComb, Manual Training High 
School, Indianapolis, Ind. 

Eliot: Silas Marner. 

Edited by Ellen E. Garrigues, De Witt Clinton High 
School, New York City. 

Franklin : Autobiography. 

Edited by Frank W. Pine, Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. 

Gray: Elegy and Other Poems, with Goldsmith: The 
Deserted Village and Other Poems. Edited by Morris 
W. Croll, Princeton University. 

Huxley: Selections. 

Edited by Charles Alphonso Smith, University of Virginia. 

Irving: Sketch Book. 

Edited by Arthur W. Leonard, Phillips Academy, Andover, 
Mass. 

Lincoln: Selections. 

Edited by William D. Armes, University of California. 

Macaulay: Life of Johnson. 

Edited by Chester N. Greenough, Harvard University. 

Macaulay: Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. 

Edited by Frederick E. Pierce, Yale University, and 
Samuel Thurber, Jr., Technical High School, Newton, Mass- 



}£ngli6b IReaDtnae tor Scbooie— Continued 

Milton: Lyric and Dramatic Poems. 

Edited by Martin W. Sampson, Cornell University. 

Old Testament Narratives. 

Edited by George H. Nettleton, Yale University. 

Scott: Quentin Durward. 

Edited by Thomas H. Briggs, Eastern Illinois State Normal 
School, Charleston, 111. 

Scott: Ivanhoe. 

Edited by Alfred A. May, Shattuck School, Faribault, Minn. 

Scott: Lady of the Lake. 

Edited by Alfred M. Hitchcock, Public High School, Hart- 
ford, Conn. 

Shakespeare: Macbeth. 

Edited by Felix E. Schelling, University of Pennsylvania. 

Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice. 

Edited by Frederick E. Pierce, Yale University. 

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar. 

Edited by Ashley H. Thorndike, Columbia University. 

Shakespeare: As You Like It. 

Edited by John W. Cunliffe and George Roy Elliott, 
University of Wisconsin. 

Stevenson: Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. 
Edited by Edwin Mims, University of North Carolina. 

Stevenson: Treasure Island. 

Edited by Stuart P. Sherman, University of Illinois. 

Tennyson: Idylls of the King. 

Edited by John Erskine, Columbia University. 

Thackeray: English Humorists. 

Edited by William Lyon Phelps, Yale University. 

Washington : Farewell Address, with Webster: First 
Bunker Hill Oration. Edited by William E. Simonds, Knox 
College, Galesburg, 111. 

Wordsworth: Selections. Also from Coleridge, Shelley, 
and Keats. Edited by James W. Linn, University of 
Chicago. 

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